This week’s selection from my inbox explores three different perspectives on how systems resist founders’ best intentions. I bring you insights about birds that teach us about adaptive leadership, the art of saying no without burning bridges and why brilliant ideas fail when they clash with existing systems.
A strand that connects all three of this week’s recommended articles is the fact that founder success isn’t about having the perfect plan. It’s about understanding the forces that push back against change and learning to work with them rather than against them.
RECOMMENDED THIS WEEK #1
The Shape of Leadership
Mike Fisher talks about how bird flight patterns – the structured V-formation of migrating geese and the fluid murmurations of starlings – can be metaphors for different leadership approaches. He argues that effective leadership isn’t about choosing one style permanently, but rather understanding which pattern the moment requires and having the discipline to shift between structure and autonomy based on circumstances.
My take:
This landed with me (do you see what I did there?) because so many founders get stuck believing their preferred leadership style is universally best, when in reality early-stage chaos and scale-stage structure demand fundamentally different approaches. Mike’s observation that V-formations work when “the cost of mistakes is high” whilst murmurations thrive “when learning matters more than efficiency” is particularly useful for founders navigating different growth phases.
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RECOMMENDED THIS WEEK #2
How to say no effectively
Justin Welsh presents a practical framework for declining requests without damaging relationships. He calls out three common failure modes: ghosting, over-explaining or saying yes when you mean no. His solution is a simple email template that responds quickly, acknowledges the request, clearly declines and (if you want) leaves the door open for future opportunities.
My take:
I’ve been thinking a lot about this myself this year. It tackles something I know most founders struggle with but rarely discuss openly – the compounding cost of poor boundaries from saying yes too often. The template itself is immediately actionable, but the real underlying thing for me is that “a clean no, delivered quickly and warmly, builds trust”. Being able to do that signals that your “yes” actually means something when you give it. I’m practising this myself in 2026.
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RECOMMENDED THIS WEEK #3
The system always kicks back
Drawing on John Gall’s systems thinking, the Flux Collective gang explain why impressive demos often fail during in the real world – because existing systems actively resist change through invisible constraints, incentives and politics. They argues against comprehensive top-down solutions in favour of incremental approaches that work within existing systems rather than attempting to replace them entirely.
My take:
I think this has to be essential reading for anyone who’s watched a “game-changing” launch or major transformation fail to gain traction despite its obvious superiority. The distinction between “disruption vs equilibrium” cuts through much of the thinking in startup culture. Resistance isn’t a temporary obstacle to overcome, it’s the default state that founders have to negotiate with rather than ignore.
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