Most leaders believe their biggest challenges are tactical or strategic. If they could just think a little harder, find the right framework, or push a little more, they'd break through.

We've spent decades sitting with leaders at exactly those moments — the edges where the old ways of working stop working and something new is trying to emerge. And here's what we keep seeing: the thing holding leaders back usually isn't a missing skill. It's an unconscious habit of thinking and leading that operates on autopilot. When leaders can't see their own defaults, they can't choose differently.

The trap is subtle, because those defaults used to work. The very behaviors that made you successful at one level become the ceiling at the next. The environment grows more complex, your default capacity stays the same, and the gap widens.

That gap is uncomfortable — but it's also the point. When leaders feel the distance between the complexity they're facing and the capacity they currently have, that tension unlocks the energy for transformation. Complexity stops being the enemy and becomes the catalyst.

Most leadership development never touches this. The standard one- and two-day workshops — communication, difficult conversations, executive presence, strategic thinking — are genuinely useful for closing skill gaps. But that's the tip of the iceberg. It does not address what leaders need to survive and thrive in today's complexity and uncertainty.

So what does? That's exactly what this series is here to explore.

Over six short episodes, we'll unpack The Aperture Effect — a different kind of growth built for a world of AI disruption, flattening organizations, and relentless uncertainty. Listen to all of them for a comprehensive introduction to this approach to leadership.

Expand your range. Develop your wisdom. Lead with all apertures.

We keep meeting leaders who have followed every rule, hit every milestone, and built real track records — and who still feel like the floor is moving under them. They're not imagining it. The challenge today isn't simply an unclear future. It's that the world is now changing faster than our leadership models can keep up.

Start with what we call the uncertainty gap. It's not just that the future is hard to predict — it's that the rate of surprise has outpaced the capacity of any planning model to absorb it. Forty-three percent of U.S. CEOs rank uncertainty as their top economic threat for 2026. Leaders burn through every tactic and strategy and still can't break through, because the environment has simply moved faster than the tools. When we ask executives about their biggest stressor, we hear the same thing over and over: the current conditions are unsustainable. Exhaustion, overwhelm, lost effectiveness; and delegation isn't enough to relieve it.

It gets worse with the flattening trap. Organizations are using AI to flatten their structures — Gartner predicts 20% will eliminate half of middle management by 2026. The result is wider spans of control and a massive cognitive load landing on the leaders who remain. More responsibility, fewer layers of support, and no reduction in expectations. That's not a personal failing; it's a structural one. And it's exactly what produces burnout.

This isn't theoretical. Cloudflare cut hundreds of roles citing a move to an "agentic AI era." Atlassian laid off staff specifically to self-fund AI investments, noting that AI changes the mix of skills required. Coinbase eliminated roles while rebuilding around smaller, flatter teams. Block cut nearly half its staff, with its CEO saying AI and flatter teams change what it means to run a company.

Underneath all of it is the complexity mandate. The outer world has gotten more complex. If a leader's inner complexity doesn't match it, the consequences are predictable: chronic overwhelm, poorer decisions, eroding trust and engagement, and, eventually, leaders exiting the organizations they once thrived in.

If you recognize yourself in the uncertainty gap or the flattening trap, you're not behind. You're encountering the real shape of leadership in this moment. And there's a way through it.

Caught in the uncertainty gap or the flattening trap? Reach out to us and discover how we can help you level up.

When a leader leans on their expertise to solve every leadership challenge, that's what we call Heroic Expert leadership. Instead of leading with a wider vision, they're fixing, controlling, and at best supervising. It feels productive. It even gets rewarded. But it has a ceiling, and most leaders hit it without realizing what they've run into.

Part of the problem is how people arrive in leadership at all. Eighty-two percent of managers are promoted for their technical expertise, with no formal leadership training. Those expert competencies are exactly what don't work when the problems become about people and systems rather than tasks. Research in adult development shows that nearly 75% of leaders operate at conventional stages — focused on rules, technical mastery, and prediction and control. Faced with complexity, they think harder, analyze more, and hunt for the right tactic. What they can't yet do is hold contradiction or work with interdependent goals: human and technological development, change and stability, planning and agility, all at once.

We see it constantly. One client always showed up in meetings to tell everyone what the problem was and what to do. That worked beautifully when he was a frontline manager. As a director at global headquarters, the same move was coddling his team, preventing them from thinking critically, owning their decisions, and collaborating in novel situations. His shift was to start meetings by providing the larger frame and context, then ask questions and listen more than he spoke, balancing advocacy with inquiry.

The cost of not making that shift is structural, not personal. The heroic model is a system design flaw, and it's unsustainable. Leadership burnout hit 56% in a 2025 study, with Gen X and Millennial leaders most affected. The fallout shows up as turnover, with 43% of organizations losing half their leadership teams. That's a symptom of the model itself.

So how do leaders actually grow beyond it? This is where the distinction between two kinds of development matters.

Horizontal development adds new skills — like adding an app to a phone. It's valuable and it's the foundation of professional growth, but it runs on the same underlying operating system. Vertical development upgrades the operating system itself: mindset, meaning-making, and adaptability. It transforms how a leader knows, not just what they know, so they can navigate complexity without collapsing back into habitual patterns.

Vertical development isn't a fad; it's grounded in decades of work by researchers like Nick Petrie, Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey, Susanne Cook-Greuter and Beena Sharma, Bill Torbert, Bill Joiner, and Claire Graves and Don Beck. At the telos institute , we draw on all of it. When a leader can match their inner complexity to the outer complexity of their environment, we call it Leadership Presence — and our practical model for developing it is Leadership Aperture, built around awareness of self, attunement to others, and alignment to the larger system.

Contact us to learn how vertical development can shift your leaders from exhausted experts to adaptive, transformational leaders.

In the telos framework, a Leadership Aperture™ is a leader's field of awareness — how broadly or narrowly they perceive and engage with reality. Your aperture shapes what you notice, how you interpret a situation, and which actions even feel possible. And here's the catch: under stress, a leader's aperture habitually narrows.

The easiest way to feel the difference is a simple analogy. Imagine a pipe that cools chemicals bursts at a factory.

• A narrow aperture leader fixes the pipe. Fast, focused, decisive.

• A medium aperture leader runs a root-cause analysis to find out why the pipe broke.

• A wide aperture leader reviews the whole system and asks whether the factory even needs those chemicals — or whether there's a fundamentally better way to operate.

None of these is wrong. Each aperture has a job. Narrow brings immediate focus and control but can miss the broader strategic context. Medium is methodical and strategic but can over-rely on data and predictability. Wide is integrative and adaptive but can lose the urgency of the moment. Think of it as shifting your focus from the trees (narrow), to the forest (medium), to the entire ecosystem (wide).

The goal isn't to live permanently at the widest aperture. It's to develop two distinct capabilities:

• Range — the ability to consciously widen your aperture to meet the complexity of the moment.

• Wisdom — the discernment to know which aperture (narrow, medium, or wide) a given situation actually calls for.

Consider a senior leader in a large hospital system — highly trusted, but stuck playing daily tactical "whack-a-mole." Our first intervention widened her Foresight aperture, carving out dedicated strategic brain space; the concrete result was an expansion plan for a second location.

But she had a second pattern. Her default aperture in the Emotional Regulation intelligence was overly "Composed" — steady and even, which made her approachable but meant her team couldn't feel the urgency of real performance issues. Her tone never moved, so the weight never landed. The counterintuitive fix was to narrow into a more "Expressive" aperture in specific moments, using a practice called labeling: "I want to be direct with you — when this doesn't get resolved, the impact on our patients is real and serious." That delivered clear criticality without sacrificing professionalism.

The outcome was a leader who could move fluidly between a wide Foresight aperture for five-year strategy and a narrow Expressive aperture for accountability — and who knew which one each moment required.

That fluency is the whole game. Most leaders default to a single aperture and run it everywhere. Range and Wisdom lets you choose.

Want to lead from more than your default aperture and increase your effectiveness? Ask us about Leadership Aperture Coaching with telos and the upcoming cohort in our flagship Vertical Frontier program.

Picture a leader who opens their 360 results and finds the feedback pulling in opposite directions. Some raters want them to think bigger and go wider. Others want them to be more specific and provide clearer direction. The instinct is to read that as a contradiction — am I too much, or not enough? — and freeze. That confusion is the trap. And it's exactly where most 360s leave leaders stranded, because they show current perceptions but offer no path forward.

The Leadership Aperture Index (LAI-360) is built differently. Like a conventional 360, it gathers feedback from five groups: Self, Managers, Direct Reports, Peers, and Other Stakeholders. But where it separates from the pack is in mapping two distinct kinds of data:

• Diagnostic data — how the leader typically behaves today.

• Developmental data — the specific shifts in focus, or aperture, that raters say the leader needs to make.

It measures nine core intelligences across three domains — Leading Self, Leading Others, and Leading Systems — each on an aperture continuum. Decision Making runs from Decisive (narrow) to Deliberate (medium) to Curious (wide). Foresight runs from Tactical to Strategic to Visionary. Solution Stance moves from Directive to Collaborative to Co-Creative. That granularity is what turns vague feedback into a usable picture.

Here's how it plays out. One client's LAI-360 showed his peers and manager wanting him to shift wider — to partner with them as a visionary problem-solver rather than treating them as superiors to follow. His direct reports, meanwhile, needed him narrower — more tactical, more accountability, clearer direction. Relying on a single stance would have failed at least one group. The answer wasn't to pick one; it was to develop the Wisdom to shift apertures fluidly and tailor his leadership to the audience.

Consider a harder case: a senior physician-leader with top-tier effectiveness scores — the kind of leader where you'd wonder what's even left to develop. Her developmental data pointed in seemingly opposite directions at once. On some intelligences, her team wanted her narrower — more decisive, more directive, owning her position instead of consulting everyone. On stakeholder influence, multiple raters wanted her wider — to stop showing up only as the brilliant subject-matter expert and start operating as a system orchestrator across the enterprise.

She could have read that as "so which is it?" But the mixed signals weren't a problem to fix. They were the map. The 360 wasn't telling her to pick a lane; it was showing her the edge — the invitation to be decisive with her team in one moment and visionary with executives in the next, with the wisdom to know which the moment called for. What changed her wasn't the scores. It was seeing the pattern: that staying composed and consultative was a single default she was running everywhere. Once she saw it, she could choose differently — and that confidence let her step into the strategic, system-level work the data had been begging her toward.

That's what the LAI-360 really does. It doesn't grade you. It hands you a map of your growing edge.

The telos LAI-360 is a foundational piece of the Vertical Frontier program. Reach out if you want to bring this diagnostic power to your leadership team.

Effective learning happens through a combination of knowledge, interaction with others, and hands-on experience. When leadership training is only knowledge transfer — a video, a workshop, a framework — leaders pick up new terminology and may even feel inspired. Then daily life resumes, the support disappears, and the new behaviors fade. Without feedback and practice, the operating system never actually changes.

Leadership Aperture Coaching is designed to close that gap. And the case for coaching is no longer anecdotal. In 2023, Academy of Management Learning and Education published the most rigorous meta-analysis of executive coaching to date — 39 randomized controlled trials, nearly 2,500 participants, almost three decades of research. The finding was unambiguous: coaching produces a statistically significant, moderate-to-large effect on leadership and personal outcomes. These weren't feel-good surveys. RCTs are the gold standard of behavioral science — the same bar we use to test medical treatments. Coaching clears it.

A telos-certified Leadership Aperture Coach takes coaching a step further, acting as a catalyst for vertical development: a safe space to question assumptions, challenge habitual patterns, and explore more advanced ways of making sense of the world. The process typically runs through six components — a leader alignment call, a debrief of the LAI-360, a Self-Observation Exercise, Edge Development Conversations and practices, a three-way sync call anchored by an Individual Development Plan, and a completion and accountability framing.

Two methodologies sit at the core. 

• The Self-Observation Exercise (SOE) builds objective, non-judgmental awareness of default tendencies — a leader picks one meeting a day to observe their Presence and notice which aperture they deployed. It's grounded in Robert Kegan's Subject-Object theory: moving a behavior from "Subject," where it controls us, to "Object," where we can finally observe and change it. 

• Edge Development Practices (EDPs) are the active, muscle-building counterpart — behavioral experiments where a leader identifies a trigger situation, executes a genuinely new move, and evaluates it afterward (say, planning an intentional mix of advocacy and inquiry before a hard meeting).

We're also AI-forward about this work. The Vertical Frontier Sherpa is an AI-powered leadership guide and conversation simulator — an always-available developmental partner that helps leaders practice wiser leadership in the flow of work. The goal isn't to replace coaching or human leadership; it's to extend the practice space between sessions.

What does this produce? Over six months, one client moved from "Lone Wolf Pace-Setter" to "Collaborative System Orchestrator." In each session, powerful questions helped him see how his old approach led him to take on too many projects, work too many hours, and stall on his biggest initiatives. The trust and consistent reflection let him lean into the discomfort of a new way of leading. In the final session, he literally looked different — no longer in scrubs and fighting a cold after back-to-back night shifts, but spaciously organizing his day around the work he most wanted to do.

This is where Leadership Aperture is distinct from performance or accountability coaching. It offers more than a defined competency. It's the chance to become more self-aware — increasing choice, and the ability to attune and align to what each situation needs.

Leadership Aperture Coaching is the catalyst that gets your leaders from where they are to where they need to be. Reach out to see if you're ready for a Leadership Aperture Coach.

Leadership was never about having all the answers. It's about creating the conditions where the best answers can emerge — from everyone, at every level, in every moment. Across this series we've built a case: the world is volatile and moving faster than any playbook, the heroic expert model is breaking, and more skills alone won't work. Vertical development is the missing piece. We've shown how Leadership Aperture builds the Range to hold a wide perspective and the Wisdom to know which aperture each moment needs, how the LAI-360 makes the path visible, and how coaching catalyzes it. This is where it all comes home.

Start with the question most organizations are avoiding: not whether your leaders need to develop, but what it costs you when they don't. When leaders are stuck at a single aperture, the price compounds. McKinsey research shows 60–70% of change initiatives fail — not because the strategy was wrong, but because the leaders executing it lacked the interior complexity to hold the tension between the old way and the new. When leaders can't build psychologically safe environments, organizations lose their early-warning systems, and ground-floor problems become executive-level crises. When leaders defend silos, decisions that should take days take months. And when culture turns toxic, you don't just lose productivity; you lose people. Leadership turnover alone costs 50–200% of that leader's annual salary, and right now 43% of organizations are losing half their leadership teams. That's not a talent problem. It's a development problem, and it has a solution.

Picture what the solution looks like. A highly accomplished surgeon came into coaching burning out, because his answer to every request was the same: step in, apply expert hands, solve it himself. That worked brilliantly on the frontline. At the leadership level it made him the organizational bottleneck — every decision routed through him, his team unable to grow because he was always in the way. After six months of Leadership Aperture Coaching, his expertise hadn't changed; his range had. When the COO asked him to lead a cross-functional event, he acted as a Coalition Builder, creating the conditions for the people closest to long-stuck problems to surface solutions. Soon after, he was appointed to lead an industry-wide group improving care across multiple hospital systems — a System Orchestrator acting from the widest aperture. He didn't become someone different. He became more fully himself, and his team and organization became more capable.

Now zoom out and imagine what's possible. What if that development weren't reserved for one high-potential surgeon, but was the organizational norm? We call it the All-Aperture Organization, and it cultivates three kinds of leaders without choosing between them. 

• Expert-focused leaders (narrow) bring deep domain mastery and meet operational needs every day.  They are valued and developed, not just tolerated.

• Achiever-focused leaders (medium) hold the vision and strategy while executing complex initiatives, translating strategy into action across functions.

• Catalyst-focused leaders (wide) anticipate scenarios that don't exist yet and co-create across enterprises and industries, meeting the moment before it arrives. 

An All-Aperture Organization builds the collective wisdom to deploy the right aperture for the challenge at hand.

The result is a faster, more resilient, more strategically capable organization; one that achieves more of its goals, weathers uncertainty with greater stability, and retains the people it has invested in. Productivity rises through clarity rather than grinding. Silos dissolve as leaders see peers as collaborators. Turnover drops because people who feel genuinely developing and connected to purpose stay. And at the deepest level, people come to work knowing they're needed, not just for executing tasks, but contributing to something that matters.

This is what future-proofing actually looks like. We've seen it, and we'd love to help you build it.

To paraphrase Charles Eisenstein: it really is time to build a more beautiful world our hearts know is possible — and we'd love to build it with you.

If this series resonates — if you're ready to stop patching leadership gaps and start building genuine developmental capacity — reach out to us at the telos institute. The next Vertical Frontier cohort launches soon, and if your team needs immediate momentum, ask us about the Change Compass.

Lisa Evert & David Cicerchi 

Most leaders measure their influence by what happens in the room. Do people listen when I speak up in a meeting? Does my team execute on what I ask? By that yardstick, it's easy to conclude you've already reached the outer edge of your impact: that you show up, people listen, and you're about as influential as you're going to get.

In this episode of The Aperture Effect, we push on that assumption. What if the room was never the boundary? What if you're already influencing people you've never met — and could be influencing a great many more, if you were willing to widen the aperture through which you see your own reach?

The Room Isn't the Boundary

Leaders can fall into a quiet trap when they equate influence with the meetings they're invited to; but ideas don't stop at the edge of a team. A proposal raised in one room can ripple into a department that never heard it pitched, plant the seed for a colleague to restructure how their group solves problems, or nudge a policy that didn't exist a quarter ago. The larger system carries influence further than any leader can track directly in real time.

In Leadership Aperture terms, seeing that ripple in their impact requires a wider lens than the one most leaders default to. Recognizing their default aperture is one thing; choosing to act differently is another. And that's where the model's language becomes useful. A leader operating from a narrow aperture optimizes their own  direct sphere of influence. Widen the aperture, and new  kinds of leaders become available:

• The leader as Coalition Builder, who connects departments and teams around a shared goal even without formal authority over either;

• The leader as System Orchestrator, who works across an entire organizational ecosystem, including competitors, suppliers, regulators that all shape the conditions a business operates in.

For example, an executive running a packaging manufacturer who, alongside the business, launched a separate nonprofit focused on sustainability. It brings suppliers from different industries together around closed-loop systems and waste reduction and it puts him in rooms with legislators, seeding ideas for tax-code changes that would make sustainable packaging easier to adopt industry-wide. The nonprofit isn't the business. But the two feed each other, and neither would exist without the leader first widening how far he believed his influence could reach.

Wider Reach Costs More and Pays More

Operating outside your direct sphere of influence takes more energy and time up front, and we wouldn’t pretend otherwise. Stepping into unfamiliar territory such as a policy conversation, a cross-industry coalition, or a system you don't control is genuinely harder than staying in the work you already do well.

But the payoff scales differently than the cost does. A leader operating from what the Leadership Aperture model calls a Visionary aperture, where they are willing to work beyond their defined expertise or immediate influence, doesn't just add value in one place. They multiply possibility across a much larger surface area, well beyond whatever a single business unit could generate operating alone.

Vertical Development Happens in the Liminal Space

Shifting aperture isn’t easy, especially for a leader who hasn’t developed the range to deploy wider apertures yet. So what actually happens inside a leader when they reach the edge of their current capacity? There are at least two options for leaders:

• One option is to retreat back to the narrow aperture, where tried-and-true expertise already feels safe, where no new energy has to be spent. The risk, of course, is that the tried-and-true may not work when something else is needed.

• The other option is to step into what telos calls the liminal space: the unknown territory between the story you've been operating from and whatever comes next. When leaders consciously face the liminal space, they can reinvent their identity and operate from a larger sphere of influence.  

Counter intuitively, this actually generates energy. Widening your sphere of influence sounds like it should be depleting: more responsibility, more unknowns, more ground to cover. In practice, leaders who make the shift often describe the opposite: real energy, generated by operating from a bigger, truer sense of who they are rather than a narrower, more defended one.

Staying Grounded in the Groundless Place

Getting to that energy requires a skill the episode treats as non-negotiable: emotional regulation. The liminal space is, by definition, groundless.  There's no established playbook for the identity you haven't fully grown into yet. Staying composed there, without shutting down and without getting swept into the uncertainty, is what allows a leader to actually do something useful with the tension rather than just survive it: to keep ideating, to keep feeling into what's emerging, and to stay present enough to notice what the moment is asking for.

From “I Am My Expertise” to “I Have My Expertise”

The distinction drawn from adult-development research describes how this vertical shift happens: from being subject to an identity to holding that identity as an object you can observe and choose from. A leader who is subject to their expertise experiences the liminal space as too disorienting, and so resists the transformation. On the other hand, when the leader can make that expertise an object can say, instead, “I have my expertise”, they can allow a change process to occur. In other words, leaders who grow vertically realize: I am not my aperture. I am the one who deploys it. 

That shift doesn't mean discarding the old expertise. It means that expertise stops running the show by default. The narrower, more expert-driven story becomes something a leader can still access when it's genuinely the right tool, while a wider aperture becomes newly available alongside it. In Leadership Aperture language, that's what it means to develop Range: not trading one fixed style for another but carrying more options, which requires a leader to develop Wisdom to choose the most effective style according to the context.

Why This Isn't Just a Leadership Conversation

This work was never only about leadership. It's about the kind of human being and the kind of leader each of us can become. When the inner work of widening your own aperture aligns with the outer work of widening your influence, the effect isn't confined to one meeting or one initiative. It ripples into teams, across departments, out into an ecosystem, the same way the ideas at the start of this conversation did.

Where to Go From Here

Curious where your own default aperture is and where the edge of your next stretch of Range actually sits? Leadership Aperture Coaching, through the telos  institute, is built to help leaders identify that edge and develop the capacity to widen it deliberately, rather than waiting for a crisis to force the shift. Reach out to Lisa and David to talk about coaching, or to learn about the upcoming cohort of the Vertical Frontier program.

Listen to the full episode of The Aperture Effect wherever you get your podcasts, and watch the video on our channel.

We had a conversation this week that we didn't plan to have. And it turned into something we want to share because it relates to so many leaders' challenges.

It started with a coaching debrief.

I (David) had just finished a session with a man in his late 50s — a successful finance executive, comfortable in his life, by any external measure, doing well. And yet. Something was nagging at him. A sense that there was so much more possible. That he was running on a track he'd been running on for decades, and the track itself had become the problem.

His pattern was characteristic of the achiever mindset, which is defined by self-agency, goal orientation, effectiveness, psychological mindedness, empathy, and a strong belief in continuous personal growth.   So his orientation was to keep moving, stay busy, get to the next thing. Can't sit still. Can't just be. The idea of pausing long enough to ask what do I really want? felt almost dangerous — like if he stopped moving, he might have to reckon with something he wasn't ready to reckon with.

Sound familiar?

The Power That's Already Yours

One of the things this executive said stuck with us: I don't really have power here. Things are just the way they are.

He was equating power with level. With hierarchy. The assumption underneath it: if I'm not at the next rung, I can't really change anything.

What we explored together was a different question. What about your power as a person — working with whoever you're working with, right now? What about the impact that comes not from your title but from your presence. 

Your curiosity. Your creativity.  The way you challenge others to see things differently. The way you help others see their own potential.  Your willingness to show up differently in a room.

That kind of power doesn't wait for a promotion. It's available today.

The Adventure That's Already Here

He mentioned he used to journal when he traveled. So I offered him something simple: What if you treated your daily work as an adventure?

Walk through offices you don't normally walk through. Change your patterns. Do something new every day — and then write about it. Not as productivity tracking. Not as performance review. As genuine field notes from an explorer.

Because here's the thing: you don't have to postpone meaning, and purpose, and joy, and excitement, and adventure. They're not waiting for you at the finish line of your career. They're available right where you are, the moment you start looking for them.

He'd already started blocking a few hours a week — time he'd been calling "planning." He renamed it. Now it's "adventure."

That's not a small thing.

What Wants to Emerge

Here's what we kept coming back to: the conversation itself felt generative. Not because we had all the answers. Because we didn't.

There's something that wants to happen in this moment — in organizations, in leaders, in culture. The breakdown we're all living through isn't just a breakdown; it’s a potential breakthrough.  Something is trying to emerge. And maybe our job, as leaders and as humans, is to listen for it. To ask: what is she whispering? What's the next step?

That's the question we're sitting with.

What's yours?