Life in Small Bites

PRECISION LEADERSHIP

Leadership should be taught primarily through decisions, behavior, reflection, and experience, rather than memorization of leadership theories.

The central Precision Leadership sequence is:

PRESSURE → PERCEPTION → CONTROL → CHARACTER → PRECISION

AI Literacy + Critical Thinking + Character + Human Agency + Decision-Making + Leadership

The ultimate objective is:

Prepare young people not merely to live with increasingly capable artificial intelligence, but to remain thoughtful, responsible, resourceful, and capable human beings while using it.

AI Literacy + Critical Thinking + Character + Human Agency + Decision-Making + Leadership

They should learn:

AI generates candidate answers drawn from distributions that may systematically favor common patterns.

That leads to a powerful educational principle for an AI-literacy curriculum:

Don’t teach students merely how to get better answers from AI. Teach them how to prevent AI’s answers from defining the boundaries of their thinking.

For high-school students preparing to enter an AI-intensive world, I would consider that one of the most important AI-literacy competencies we could teach.

Expansion Loops in pipelines

As someone with your background in risk management, you might appreciate this perspective: the expansion loop is a deliberate engineering “stress relief valve.” Instead of trying to eliminate thermal forces—which is impossible—the designers provide a controlled, predictable place for those forces to be safely absorbed. That design philosophy is common across high-reliability systems in pipelines, bridges, aircraft, and power plants.

Sovereign Individual

Connections to Your Precision Leadership Framework

Several ideas align naturally with your work on Precision Leadership:

• Self-sovereignty: Effective leaders cultivate disciplined thinking and personal responsibility rather than dependence on external circumstances.
• Decision-making under uncertainty: In rapidly changing environments, leaders need principles that remain stable even when conditions shift.
• Lifelong learning: Continuous adaptation becomes a competitive advantage.
• AI literacy: Understanding and leveraging AI is increasingly central to leadership effectiveness.
• Character as a differentiator: As technical capabilities become more widely available, judgment, integrity, and trust become increasingly valuable.

These themes complement your emphasis on helping leaders maintain clarity, character, and precision under pressure.

Connections to Your Precision Leadership Framework

Several ideas align naturally with your work on Precision Leadership:

• Self-sovereignty: Effective leaders cultivate disciplined thinking and personal responsibility rather than dependence on external circumstances.
• Decision-making under uncertainty: In rapidly changing environments, leaders need principles that remain stable even when conditions shift.
• Lifelong learning: Continuous adaptation becomes a competitive advantage.
• AI literacy: Understanding and leveraging AI is increasingly central to leadership effectiveness.
• Character as a differentiator: As technical capabilities become more widely available, judgment, integrity, and trust become increasingly valuable.

These themes complement your emphasis on helping leaders maintain clarity, character, and precision under pressure.

Your ability to digest and transfer complex knowledge, even at work. Knowing how to break down a problem from scratch. Building trust. Doing what you said you would do, on time. If you invest 80% of your learning effort into these invariant skills, you will never become obsolete.

From Biological War: a scenario – lessons similar to to Precision Leadership.

Leadership Lessons

The book is fundamentally about leadership under extreme uncertainty.

Effective leaders should:

• Make decisions despite incomplete information.
• Communicate honestly.
• Maintain public trust.
• Coordinate across agencies.
• Balance liberty with public safety.
• Think in systems rather than isolated events.
• Prepare before crises occur.

Homer — The Odyssey — Every journey is also a reckoning with who you’ve become along the way.

Leadership Lessons

For leaders, We highlights enduring principles:

• Efficiency should not eclipse human dignity.
• Transparency is essential, but so are privacy and personal freedom.
• Data should inform decisions, not replace judgment.
• Encourage questioning rather than blind compliance.
• Preserve creativity and dissent as sources of resilience.
• Design systems that augment human capabilities instead of diminishing them.

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Relevance to Precision Leadership

Your Precision Leadership framework aligns well with several lessons from We:

• Pressure: Crises can tempt leaders to centralize control in the name of efficiency.
• Perception: Data and AI outputs are valuable, but leaders must recognize their limitations and potential biases.
• Character: Ethical principles should constrain how technology is used, especially when it affects people’s rights and opportunities.
• Precision: Effective leaders integrate analytical tools with human judgment rather than treating algorithmic recommendations as infallible.

The World Economic Forum consistently ranks resilience, flexibility, agility, and self-awareness among the most important future workforce skills.

Implications for Higher Education

Traditional education often rewards:

• memorization,
• recall,
• information storage.

AI increasingly performs these functions.

Future education should emphasize:

• judgment,
• ethics,
• communication,
• leadership,
• adaptability,
• critical thinking.

I was sitting on the carpeted floor of a small conference room with fifty other participants, being coached by Tony Robbins.

Tony was teaching one of his core principles: see reality as it is — not worse than it is.

He asked us to think of a personal goal, and the obstacle that seemed to stand between us and it. The instruction was simple. Name the obstacle clearly. Then, in a strong state — with real intention and energy — declare: “What if it wasn’t?”

He paired us off. One partner, “A,” would describe a goal and its obstacle. The other, “B,” would just listen — no fixing, no advice. Then we’d switch.

I was “A.” Kneeling on the floor, telling my story, my leg fell asleep. I said so out loud, annoyed at the interruption.

My partner had been listening closely. She looked me in the eye and asked:

“What if it wasn’t?”

My leg wasn’t asleep anymore.

No lightning, no voice from the sky — just a body doing, instantly, what a mind had just been told to expect. We sat there a second, stunned. Then we started talking fast: what did that mean, what else could it apply to, why did it work.

I’ve gone back to that moment many times since. When an obstacle looks solid and fixed — a stalled project, a diagnosis, a door that seems closed — I name it clearly, and then, with the same intention, ask myself and whatever is listening: “What if it wasn’t?” The obstacle doesn’t always dissolve. But it stops being a wall and becomes a question — and a question is a very different thing to stand in front of than a wall. More than once, that shift alone has been enough to find a way through I couldn’t see a moment before.

My partner that day — the one who asked the question — was Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher).

Sometimes, without warning, the universe hands you a gift to guide the rest of your journey.

Formation Flying

“Vision without action is a daydream.
Action without vision is a nightmare.”
— Japanese Proverb

“Leadership is a can-do, get-it-done, everyone-pull-together, whatever-it-takes attitude.”
— Orville Schell

Leadership and management are often taught as sciences, complete with theories, models, and best practices. These are valuable, but experience has taught me that they are ultimately more art than science.

The art lies in knowing when to apply the right technique, how to adapt it to the people and culture involved, and when to change course. Effective leaders continuously observe, measure, and adjust. Success rarely comes from rigid adherence to a plan; it comes from disciplined adaptation.

Leadership requires both vision and execution.

Management requires both discipline and decisiveness.

Neither is effective without the other.

Principles of Precision Leadership

• Develop a clear vision before committing resources.
• Translate vision into purposeful action.
• Measure reality continuously—not assumptions.
• Adjust quickly when circumstances change.
• Never become complacent during success.
• Invest continually in future opportunities.
• Make timely decisions with the best available information.
• Build resilient teams that trust one another under pressure.

Always Be Prepared

Aviation taught me that every flight begins with contingency planning.

Always have:

• A backup plan.
• An exit strategy.
• An alternate destination.
• Enough reserve capacity to recover from the unexpected.

Hope is never a strategy.

Begin Every Plan with the Five Essential Questions

Every mission, project, or decision should begin by answering:

• What are we trying to accomplish?
• Who is responsible?
• Where will it happen?
• Why does it matter?
• How will we execute successfully?

Clear answers to these five questions create alignment, accountability, and purposeful action.

Precision Leadership begins with clear thinking, disciplined planning, decisive execution, and continuous adaptation.

Leadership is the disciplined practice of restoring hope through understanding, competence, and action. Lasting change begins when people feel seen, respected, and empowered to embrace a better future.

Below is a summary written by Brian Johnson, CEO of Heroic Benefit Corp, of Stephen Joseph’s book, “What Doesn’t Kill Us…”,  See more info on Heroic at: https://bit.ly/4c0nDBS

Today’s book: What Doesn’t Kill Us: The New Psychology of Posttraumatic Growth by Stephen Joseph—a paradigm-shifting look at how suffering doesn’t just break us—but can become a catalyst for deeper strength, meaning, and growth.

Here’s your 1-minute summary:

• Posttraumatic growth is real. Many people don’t just recover—they transform. Growth comes in five domains: strength, new possibilities, relationships, appreciation, and spiritual change.
• Stress is an engine, not just damage. Stephen argues that the pain and disruption of trauma can ignite processes that rebuild—and even improve—our lives.
• The “shattered vase” metaphor matters. When life breaks you, you don’t glue the broken pieces back exactly—you rearrange them into a new, stronger form.
• Resilience requires meaning-making. Growth doesn’t happen by accident—you actively integrate your suffering into a story that points toward purpose.
• Use the THRIVE model. Stephen outlines steps—Taking stock, Harvesting hope, Re-authoring, Identifying change, Valuing change, Expressing it through action—to turn adversity into new life.

Trauma is not your destiny—it’s your doorway. What one step will you take today to re-author your story and claim your growth?

What Doesn’t Kill Us—phenomenal book. Post traumatic stress, post traumatic growth; check out the Notes for the science on how to make the shift.