The Pebble, The Lens and The Ripples

Imagine standing beside a perfectly still pond. 

The surface is calm enough to reflect everything around it. Then someone drops a single pebble in, and rings move outward until they touch every edge of the water. 

Most of what gets talked about in leadership is the rings. Nearly everything we call leadership development focuses on them — communication, delegation, giving feedback well, running a difficult conversation. All genuinely useful, and all, in a very real sense, downstream. They’re the visible part, the part you can put in a course outline and measure with a survey afterward. But ripples don’t create themselves. Something dropped into the water first, and it usually happened so long ago, and so quietly, that most leaders have never gone looking for it. 

Here’s the idea. Somewhere early — often much earlier than your first real leadership role — something landed in the water. A moment where you learned, without anyone sitting you down and explaining it, what it took to be safe, or valued, or good enough. Maybe it was praise for always having the answer. Maybe it was a period where asking for help felt genuinely risky. Maybe it was simply watching someone you respected lead a certain way, and quietly deciding that was what “good” looked like. 

That’s the pebble. And here’s the part that matters: 

it doesn’t just create ripples once and settle. It becomes something more like a lens — a way of seeing that sits underneath every decision you make as a leader, usually so early and so invisibly that you’ve never actually questioned it. Most leadership development hands you techniques for managing the ripples. Useful, and worth having. But if the lens underneath hasn’t shifted, you’ll keep reaching for the same old reactions the moment the pressure is real, no matter how many new techniques you’ve collected on top. 

I worked with a leader who reacted defensively almost every time their judgement was questioned — not loudly, just a quick, controlled tightening, a need to justify the decision immediately rather than hear the challenge. They knew it happened. Knowing it happened had never once stopped it from happening again. 

One day I asked a different kind of question. Not “why do you react that way,” but “when do you first remember feeling like you had to defend a decision to be taken seriously?” They went quiet, then told me about a much earlier role, years before they’d ever led anyone, where a senior figure had a habit of publicly picking apart other people’s decisions in front of the team. They’d learned fast that an undefended decision was a decision that got dismantled in front of everyone. Defend first. Always. 

That was the pebble. Decades old, entirely reasonable given where it landed, and still quietly running the lens through which every piece of feedback since had been filtered — as a threat to survive, not information to use. Once they saw where it had come from, the defensiveness didn’t vanish overnight. But they finally had something to work with, rather than a reaction that simply arrived, unexplained, every time. 

This week, pick one reaction you have as a leader that shows up reliably, the same way, almost every time. 

Ask yourself honestly: when do I first remember learning that this was the safe way to respond? You may not land on an answer straight away. The noticing is the beginning of the work, not the whole of it. 

If this resonates, 

the Leader’s Identity Guide – Foundations is built to help you work through this properly.