The Thinking Gap in Modern Leadership

And the Capabilities We Need in a World That Won't Slow Down

When I’m with a client, I might ask a question, and time will pause.

They’ll stop for a moment. Usually say something along the lines of “that’s a good question. I’ve not thought about that before”. Their eyes will flicker up and to the left. They’ll get a far-away look on their face and all I know is that I have to wait…to see what emerges. It may be a few seconds. Maybe minutes. Even on zoom, you can feel the pressure building in the air. I smile knowing that whatever comes next will be important.

It is the window to new thinking - gently creaking open.

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I believe that coaching is an antidote to a world that’s moving faster than most of us can think.

Over the past few decades, we have learnt to work at great speed, juggling balls and spinning plates; reacting and responding to ever more demands. But with each faster turn of the wheel, we are widening what I call the Thinking Gap – the growing distance between how fast our systems now move and how quickly humans can realistically process events, integrate learnings and decide with good judgement.

As we find ourselves leading through more uncertain times, this gap is becoming harder to ignore. Coaching is one of the few places where leaders can step out of the noise and look at the system they are operating within, rather than staying trapped inside it. It is a deliberate interruption to momentum in a system that rarely stops.

The volume of information that we’re now filtering and trying to make sense of, has grown exponentially. News. Social media. Slack channels. Teams notifications. Whatsapp groups. Back-to-back zoom calls. Strategy, risk, culture, performance, tech – all living side-by-side in the same in-box. Most of us are in a state of constant overwhelm, and it’s little wonder. Our brains were not evolved for this. This is a working world that has lost its sense of human pace.

We make decisions efficiently, but later doubt ourselves and wonder whether we considered all the possible risks. We replay conversations in our head at night and realise the insight arrived several hours too late to be useful. We have a vague sense that something isn’t quite right, but can’t put a finger on what. We’re holding a lot together, but feel less clear than we used to.

‘Busy’ has become a badge of honour. We have learnt that striving is good, a full calendar means we’re worthwhile and space is there to be filled. We’ve become like hamsters on a wheel; exerting huge effort just to stay still, and in constant fear that if we get off - even for a minute - it’ll keep on spinning and we’ll all be left behind.

We’re also in a time of technological and societal transition. A fundamental moment when we desperately need leaders who can think clearly, decide well, and lead with good judgement. Global Workforce research shows that AI and automation are reshaping roles faster than organisations can redesign them. Whole industries are rapidly changing shape before our very eyes.  We’re moving through ongoing transformation - not just discrete change cycles; there is no longer a base-line that we can retreat to until the next wave comes along. It’s a constant tsunami of change, information and innovation. All of this is happening with a backdrop of Global instability the likes of which we’ve not seen since WWII - and an unpredictable future for our industries, our livelihoods and our society. As a leader in this context, you’re navigating shifting goal-posts, unrealistic targets, more complex decision-making, and the insecurities (let’s call it what it is: it’s fear) of all those around you.

Your Leadership. Your Thinking: they’ve never been more important than they are right now.

The Erosion of Good Thinking

AI was supposed to save us time, but at least while we’re learning and integrating, it only adds to the noise. We ask it one simple question and get six possible answers and an invitation to take the project in yet more directions never previously considered. It’s not one tool - it’s many - all of which have different capacities and varying success-rates. Its impact is exhausting. And the more we use it, the more it dulls our ability to think for ourselves.

Because thinking for ourselves takes clarity. That takes space. That takes asking ourselves difficult questions, one at a time, and sitting in the unknowing instead of brute-forcing an answer.

This is why I know coaching is so valuable. Coaching gives us the opportunity to rise up from the mental noise and to zoom out. To make sense of things and work out what’s actually important. To problem-solve effectively. To ideate. To get perspective and to find our intention. With attention-spans reducing and focus deteriorating, this matters. We are all witnessing and participating in the erosion of good thinking.

Before I trained as a coach, I spent 15 years inside fast-paced, client-driven environments where expectations were high, time was scarce, and thinking space as a leader was unheard-of. I know what it’s like to carry responsibility, absorb constant input, and make judgement calls under pressure whilst always needing to appear calm and capable. To be the leader that others look to for answers, even when you’re still trying to work out the question itself.

When I discovered coaching, it was an absolute revelation to me. I didn’t even know it existed. Training and career development were barely discussed in the companies I worked for: we learnt on the job. Performance reviews were a tick-box exercise. Support was sparse. I couldn’t believe it had taken so long for me to clock on that I could take responsibility for my own experience. I thought back on everything I’d been up against in my career, and could only imagine the difference coaching could have made to my progression, my potential and my sense of self - if I'd had someone in my corner during those defining moments of transition, stretch and struggle. All the times I was being pulled in every direction and felt like I had to carry it all on my own.

The Real Cost of a World That Never Slows

Over the past couple of years, I’ve been deepening my understanding of coaching for mental health. I was shocked by the statistics that showed vast numbers of people suffering under sustained and unmanageable pressure, and I wanted to play my part in solving the Mental Health at work crisis. In that time I helped many leaders to rebuild their sense of self after long periods of sustained pressure which had eroded their confidence, passion and purpose. That still forms a part of what I do. But I couldn’t shake the niggling feeling that I was working too far downstream. I was operating at the level of effect, not cause – offering a band-aid, when it should have been a vaccine. The real root of the problem? The fast-paced, rapidly-changing society that we now find ourselves in, and the very real pressures that leaders face in an environment that is constantly shifting.

Change exacerbates stress because so much of stress is about control and clarity.  Without these things, our brains can’t make sense of what’s expected of us. Our confidence dips and overwhelm sets in.

Change rocks our sense of security and leaves us in a permanent state of unknowing. As anyone familiar with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs will know, security is one of the fundamental building blocks of wellbeing. Without it, we’re living off our survival instincts, and this changes the whole emotional tone of work. Trust dissipates. It's each man for himself. Fight or flight. Do or die. We start to lose our humanity.

Is it possible to thrive in this context? I believe it is. But we have to adapt. “What got you here, won’t get you there.”

Having coached numerous leaders over the course of over 1,000 hours, I’ve noticed a pattern emerge. I’ve observed that there are Five core leadership capabilities which, taken together, define what it now takes to stay steady, thoughtful and effective – even when everything around you keeps shifting.

These are capabilities, not exercises to complete or new skills to add to your CV. They are ways of relating to pressure that make leadership feel more intentional and less reactive. They won’t fix the broken system, but they might just give you a chance to thrive within it.

If you’re wondering how you can lead well through uncertain times, you can explore my 1:1 Coaching Programme: The Antidote

The Five Leadership Capabilities for Uncertain Times

1. Take Control - Get out of the Speeding Car

Stress can sometimes feel like Formula 1. You’re holding on tightly to the steering wheel as the car shakes with momentum, alert to the fact that one wrong move will have you careering off-track. You’re hyper-focused on the road ahead, reacting in the moment, adrenaline pumping. Concentrating on what’s going to directly keep you alive. But how aware are you of an impending band of rain, a crash around the corner ahead of you, or a potential short-cut?

Imagine instead - stepping out of the car and into the control room. From here, you can see the whole system. The conditions. The patterns. The strategy. The risks. You’re not calmer because things have slowed down, but because you’ve changed your vantage point.

This is about gaining enough perspective to be able to ask yourself: What’s actually happening here? What forces are at play? What’s within my influence and what isn’t? What options genuinely exist? When leaders are able to develop this capacity, it becomes less about ‘holding more’ and more about ‘choosing better’.

2. Find Your Focus: Cut Through the Mental Clutter

Uncertainty scatters your attention. Everything feels important, and nothing ever feels finished. Many leaders carry a constant mental backlog of half-owned tasks, unresolved conversations, fast-made decisions, and ideas jostling for space. Leaders suffering from this often talk of ‘brain fog’, or of feeling ‘scatty’ and ‘all over the place’. It often stimulates their self-critic because they feel like they’re making too many mistakes. But focus isn’t lost through getting things wrong. The signal-to-noise ratio has simply collapsed. Their hard-drive has reached critical capacity.

Focus isn’t about trying harder but about sorting. I find it starts with offloading. Getting what’s spinning around in your head out and into the open, shaping it into themes and patterns. From there, focus can become an act of discernment rather than endurance.

The sailboat metaphor can be useful here. Think about it: when the sea’s rough, progress doesn’t come from fighting the waves. It comes from understanding what anchors you and what actually moves you forward. Knowing when to batten down the hatches, and when to let out the sails. Asking yourself: What really matters now?  What can wait, even if it’s noisy? What can sustain me while I wait this out?

When focus returns, so does your agency. You stop feeling pulled in every direction and start choosing where to put your energy.

3. Depersonalise: Don't Make Everything Mean Something About You

When things don’t ever get a chance to settle, confidence can start to wobble.

The uncertainty of direction can mean that targets might get missed. Tensions can rise over ownership of blame. And doubt can start to set in, as if every delay, reaction or resistance is a verdict on a person’s own competence. We have to understand that nothing, ever, is entirely about us. We are operating in an ecosystem.

Depersonalisation isn’t detachment, and it's not about avoidance of responsibility. It’s about understanding people enough to recognise that pressure makes us behave in predictable ways. Systems create dynamics, and not everything that lands on you, necessarily belongs to you.

One client described this capacity as ‘healthy distance, without disengagement’. It wasn’t about caring less. She wanted to disentangle herself emotionally so that she could feel more ease. As with others I’ve coached, I noticed that the more she was able to see things from outside of herself, the lighter she became. With perspective and objectivity, came clarity – and with that, a bit more peace (and a few less sleepless nights).

4. Creating Optionality: Ask - 'So What Now?' - Without Panic

The world isn’t going back to how it was.

Roles are changing. Industries are shifting. Certainty is increasingly short-term. Many leaders feel this as a low-level anxiety about relevance, direction, or what comes next.

Optionality is the ability to stay open to possibility rather than being consumed by doubt. Like the Stockdale Paradox, it’s about holding harsh realism with a strong belief that there is a way forwards.

Optionality will be vital if we want to survive in an AI-integrated world. Knowledge-based jobs will quickly be phased out. What then? Do we descend into anarchy whilst we scrabble for the last few remaining jobs, or do we focus on the opportunity that this new revolution presents? This may be about strategic career moves and pivots - spotting opportunities to capitalise on what makes us human and what really sets us apart. We will also have a chance to re-evaluate long-established ways of working and ask, with clarity rather than fear, whether they still make sense.

Leaders with optionality don’t resist change. They work with it, and ensure that if there’s an answer, they’ll find it.

5. Self-Leadership: Choose Who you Are Inside the Mess

This is where everything comes together.

Self-leadership is the move from reaction to intention. It’s about no longer being carried by circumstances, and instead, choosing how to meet them.

It involves an uncomfortable truth: you may not be able to change the context. The pace may remain demanding. The system may stay imperfect.  Things may indeed get harder before they get better. But you still get to choose who you are within it.

This is about stepping off the conveyor belt for long enough to think. To reconnect with what matters, lead from clarity rather than momentum, and to take radical responsibility for your own experience.

What Now Becomes Possible

When these five capabilities are in place, something else begins to happen.  Leaders are not only coping better or managing pressure more effectively. They are regaining access to an entirely different quality of thinking.

Enter, stage left: Reimagination. Reimagination is not blue-sky creativity or abstract visioning. It’s the capacity to step back far enough from the familiar to see it clearly again. To question assumptions that have quietly hardened into ‘how things are done’, and notice where systems are being maintained out of habit rather than intention.

In a changing world, this matters more than ever. We’re moving into a period where many of the systems and processes leaders inherited are no longer fit for purpose. They were built for a different pace, a different scale, and a different relationship between humans and technology.

The transition to an AI-integrated world raises questions. If tasks can be automated, what should human attention be used for instead? If decisions can be informed by vast amounts of data, where does judgement sit? If information is abundant, how do we decide what actually matters?

These aren’t technical questions. They’re leadership questions. And they can’t be answered on the fly, between meetings, or at the end of an already over-full day. Reimagination only becomes possible when leaders are no longer permanently reactive. When they’re not firefighting, defending or rushing to keep up. When they have enough internal steadiness to tolerate not knowing, and enough clarity to sit with complexity without immediately trying to close it down.

This is why reimagination isn’t a starting point, but an outcome.

It emerges as leaders regain control over where they place their attention, focus on what truly matters, and create enough distance from daily noise to think with perspective. The leaders who shape what comes next may not be the loudest or the fastest, but they are the ones who create the space to think clearly about what they are building and why, resisting the temptation to simply layer new technology onto old systems and instead asking more fundamental questions about how work should work in our time.

This is where my work sits.

I offer leaders a calm, stable space to develop and integrate these capabilities, so that reimagination can become possible. A place for you to slow the pace for just long enough to think beyond optimisation and efficiency, and towards design and intention. Only then can you explore what needs to be let go of, what needs to be rebuilt, and what kind of leadership the next chapter genuinely calls for.

This approach underpins my work with senior leaders and sits at the heart of my 1:1 coaching programme The Antidote – a deliberate counterweight to a working world that has lost its sense of human pace.

The Antidote restores the conditions for clear thinking: space, perspective and positive intention. Complexity won't - it can’t - be removed, but leaders will learn to navigate it with greater steadiness and choice.

In a world that keeps accelerating, coaching doesn’t slow you down for the sake of it; it helps you to move forward with good judgement, more agency and enough space to imagine what you are actually building next. And in my experience, that’s not a luxury reserved for moments of crisis.

It’s an antidote to a working world that has forgotten how humans think.

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I'm Helen Barnes. I’m a confidential thinking partner (AKA Executive Coach) for senior leaders in fast-moving, high-pressure and complex roles.

My core 1:1 executive coaching offer, The Antidote, is designed to restore clarity, perspective and intentionality in a world that rarely slows down.

If you’re considering coaching and want to understand whether this approach is right for you, the best place to start is a conversation.

Book an Exploratory Conversation