Are You A Candle Or A Fire?
Are You A Candle Or A Fire?
PLUS: When Leaders Get It 95% Wrong
October 11, 2026
“Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire.”
\- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Geo-political incidents. AI. Covid. Culture wars. You can view them as isolated anomalies if you want. I would argue you need to treat them as the norm.
This was front of mind for me recently as we staged a 'How To Lead With A Special Forces Mindset' workshop in London for a leadership team seeking to innovate in a traditional sector.
The workshop is designed to test many capabilities, but foremost amongst them is cognitive flexibility.
In our work training leaders as cognitive athletes, we define this as the ability to think adaptively in the face of rapidly changing circumstances. Processing the situation at speed and recalibrating thoughts, plans and actions.
If anyone understands the importance of this, it's Kevin O'Connor, our Elite Performance Advisor.
Kevin was a Team Leader in the Special Reconnaissance Regiment, where he led surveillance and counter-surveillance operations in the UK and overseas.
The workshop is inspired by two missions he led. It perfectly captures one of our core beliefs.
Sh\*t is going to happen. You can train how you respond to it.
THE SCIENCE
In 1994, America’s National Transportation Safety Board published a review of 37 major airline accidents between 1978 and 1990. In every one, the flight crew had been cited as a cause or contributing factor.
NASA researcher Judith Orasanu and her colleagues then analysed the tactical decision errors in those accidents.
About three quarters followed the same pattern. Crews carried on with their original plan even when the conditions around them began to shift.
They termed it ‘plan continuation error’. Once a plan has been committed to, it becomes harder to recognise the signals that it needs to change.
Pressure makes switching even harder, and neuroscientists have observed what happens in the brain.
Researchers at Weill Cornell scanned 20 people who had spent a month under the stress of preparing for a major exam. Under that stress, they were worse at switching their attention from one thing to another.
Their scans showed weaker connections in the brain network that handles that switching. A month after the pressure eased, they were back to normal.
Physiology and psychology together help explain why a plan already in motion gets harder to abandon.
THE PROOF
Keith O’Malley-Farrell, our Head of Executive Resilience, is leading an expedition in the Himalayas as I write this.
Sadly that world provides some textbook examples of how losing cognitive flexibility can result in tragedy.
That pattern played out on K2, the world’s second highest mountain, in the summer of 2008. Ten teams had been waiting at base camp for a break in the weather, some of them for almost two months.
One of them was Hugues d’Aubarède, a 61-year-old Frenchman from Lyon who had already climbed four of the world’s 8,000-metre peaks.
The window opened at the end of July, and in the early hours of 1 August more than 20 climbers set out for the summit, many of them with years of experience on the world’s highest mountains.
The plan relied on fixed ropes through the Bottleneck, a narrow gully under a huge wall of ice. The ropes had been laid too low on the route and there weren’t enough left for the hardest section. Teams spent hours moving ropes up the mountain while a queue built behind them.
Two members of the American team, Eric Meyer and Fredrik Sträng, looked at the queue and decided to turn back.
The weather was clear and calm, and they had waited weeks for it. They were worried about reaching the summit too late and about spending so long under that ice wall in a crowd.
Most of the others kept going. Eighteen reached the summit, some as late as 8pm, when the usual window is between 3pm and 5pm.
Many came down in the dark, and when a serac (a huge block of ice) collapsed it cut the fixed ropes. Eleven people died over that day and the next, d’Aubarède among them.
Everest in 1996 followed the same pattern. Rob Hall, an experienced guide, set a 2pm turnaround time for his team and was still high on the mountain after it, with a client. Eight climbers died in the storm that followed.
Cognitive rigidity can have very real consequences.
THE APPLICATION
The cognitive athlete prepares for these situations in business and in life.
It’s also what our workshops are designed to test.
In our latest 'How To Lead With A Special Forces Mindset' workshop, we split the leadership team into three competing teams of SF operatives.
I can’t give too much away, but during one of their missions we’d deliberately inserted a change in circumstances to test the ability of the teams and individuals within them to shift their thinking.
It was fascinating to see which teams moved quickest and which found it difficult to let go of the original plan. Those skills are transferable - in today’s business world, we all know speed matters.
Leaders like you can have a particular challenge here. The more status and power you hold, the more it can feel as though changing your mind will make you look indecisive or weak.
Trust me. That’s a fallacy. Changing your mind when the facts change is a sign of strength.
And don’t forget, power dynamics mean your team picks up on everything you do, so a leader who adapts openly gives permission for everyone else to do the same.
It starts with self-awareness, which means analysing how you react when circumstances shift. As leaders, we like to feel in control, so it can be disconcerting when events dictate otherwise. Acceptance is key here, freeing you up to move to action.
When working with your team, always think of these 3 practical steps:
- Treat any plan as a hypothesis
Build it, test it, review the data and act on it. Changing course because the data has changed is what all the greats do, whether it’s entrepreneurs, scientists, or generals. That's how real progress is made.
- Create an adaptive environment
When you set a plan, agree with your team what would make you change it, and who gets to call it out if you won’t. That makes adapting part of the plan rather than a retreat from it.
- Build a dynamic system
For your biggest priority, put “What has changed since we made this plan?” on the agenda of your regular meetings. That keeps you course-correcting as you go, so you stay on the mission.
The winds of change are constant. Train to be the fire.
BOOK A WORKSHOP
Our Prime Performance workshops are all immersive learning experiences, deliberately designed to teach the skills leaders need most right now.
##### Choose from:
How To Lead With A Special Forces Mindset
Train Like A Cognitive Athlete
Learn The Mental Secrets of Elite Performers
##### To find out more, email jason@primeperformancelabs.com
LIVE BETTER, LEAD BETTER
The best content I researched this week:
1. In just over 2 minutes, author and thought leader Simon Sinek gives a masterclass in what cognitive flexibility looks like in action.
2. “Too many leaders think that everything has a spill-in-aisle-nine urgency to it. They also feel incredibly uncomfortable with uncertainty. What I found over and over again is when people try to fill uncertainty with their own narrative about what’s certain, it’s nearly 95 percent wrong.” So says Jim Bildner, CEO of the Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation (DRK), a global venture philanthropy firm. In a great interview with McKinsey he reveals how to turn hope into action.
3. In my experience, great leaders have adaptive mindsets and consider themselves explorers rather than experts, which is why this quote resonates so strongly.
Share this with a fellow leader - we’re stronger together.
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