21-07-2025
Why Stepping Away From Your Calendar Could Be Your Best Strategic Move
Jo Ilfeld, PhD, CEO of Incite To Leadership, helps companies maintain momentum & competitive advantage through executive team performance.
I'm a mile above my office, writing this article on an airplane. It's hard to find time otherwise in the middle of an "ordinary" workday, with meetings, calls and emails. Does this sound familiar?
Yet blocks of time set aside for deep thinking are essential. You need space to think, disentangle and create the new—tasks that remain unfinished when you try to fit them in between 30-minute meeting slots.
With Google searches and ChatGPT responses, we have a tsunami of information and answers all around us. The key is asking the right questions.
Embracing The Darkness
There's a Zen tale of a man searching at night under a streetlight. When you approach him, he says he's lost his car keys. "You think you dropped them right around here?" you ask. "No," he replies. "I heard them drop over there in the dark, but this is where the light is."
I believe all of us are similar to this "lost-keys man." We search and search for answers while trying to steer clear of the dark, the places that feel uncomfortable or untraveled. But these days, we find ourselves being pulled more and more into uncharted territory.
On a global scale, allies are breaking up and finding new replacements; our healthcare system has new rules, less funding for research and a new skepticism of scientific data; and in many leadership spaces, the importance of diversity is being questioned. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.
During extraordinary times, the tried and true answers that have helped in the past are usually not sufficient for the circumstances you find yourself in.
Avoiding Tunnels
Embracing the dark, instead of only searching "where the light is," often means we need to step away from the siren call of our to-do lists. I have embraced rising 30,000 feet in the air to get away from it all and write, and I frequently urge my clients to set aside meaningful strategic time to take a bird's eye view of what's really needed of them, of their team and in their org.
When you're stressed, your view of the world literally narrows to what's most important in front of you. This is called "tunneling" and has been extensively studied. Tunneling is perfect for completing a timely report but is a disaster for innovation.
Unfortunately, your Teams or Google Calendar is masterful at getting you tunneled on what's next in your day, not what truly needs your attention most. If you are responsible for any strategic planning, strategic decisions or creative endeavors, you need to figure out regular ways to escape the tyranny of your calendar, your to-do lists and your tunneling brain.
Three Ways To Get A Bird's Eye View
Here are some suggestions:
With the increase in global and remote teams, management via Gemba walks is less impactful, but that doesn't erase the power of seeing things from a new perspective. Whether it's working from a café (especially one without Wi-Fi!), taking a 15-minute break to walk around the block or disconnecting with a book break, stepping back lets your mind work in new ways.
And we need new thoughts. We need new energy and life to light up the darker, unfamiliar places and give us some new paths to try that we didn't have the time to dream up before.
In his most recent book, Reset, Dan Heath tells the story of a new manufacturing employee who asked why the company always turned off the machines during lunch hour. It turned out this was a decades-old practice of managing power surges that no longer occurred; yet switching the machines off was still accepted as standard practice.
I find that often, when leaders attend team meetings, they don't want to seem like they don't understand, so they refrain from asking too many curious questions. But if you've embraced forgoing questions to avoid looking ignorant, you too are someone who will avoid looking around in the dark. Because in the dark, no one has the answers; all you have are more and more questions.
So, try to make it a personal practice to always ask when you don't understand something. Trust me, you're not the only one who's confused—you're just the only one brave enough to inquire. And you know what's a great question to bat around with your team? "What if we ...?"
If you've been in biotech for 20 years, you know a lot about how things get done in biotech, but you're probably less familiar with finance or retail. Make sure you're having in-depth conversations with your peers in other industries at least monthly.
That means going through your contacts and intentionally reaching out to people you've met at conferences and school open houses and through friends. Then have some of those old-school business lunches, or new-school Zoom coffees, to hear what's up in their industry, what changes they're noticing and what's on their horizon. Innovative ideas are often one industry's standard practice applied in new ways to other industries. That's how the software industry adopted Agile from the manufacturing sector and how barcodes, developed for the retail sector transformed healthcare and reduced medical errors.
If you want to keep hearing the same things, keep talking only to those in your industry. But if you realize that being on the cutting edge is key to being an innovative leader, make sure you're broadening your worldview regularly by expanding who you come into contact with.
Final Thoughts
It's true that sometimes you just need to put your head down, focus and use tunneling to get a big project over the finish line. In this era of constant change, though, much of your value comes from looking for opportunities where others haven't yet.
To venture into those unknown places, you need to develop regular practices of strategic exploration—stepping away from what you know to make room for something new.
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