Agile and Lean Leadership: Lessons from the F1 Pit Lane | #48

Welcome to Unleash youh Impact, Unlock Others, a podcast about inspiring leadership. We hope to bring you grounded wisdom, stories from real leaders and leave you feeling inspired. Let's dive in. Okay.

Welcome back to Unleash youh Impact, Unlock Others. Or given what I've been suffering with the last week, I'm going to call it unleash your flu Infect others. Today I'm with Rich Horton. Hi, Rich.

Hi, Dave. It's good to have you back at work.

I'm glad you're still feeling okay because a lot of people aren't.

No, indeed, indeed.

But no, we won't rename the podcast, but maybe just for this week. So, Rich, here's a little situation to imagine for you.

Imagine you are a Formula One pit crew member and you've got just 1.9 seconds to change four tyres, refuel the car and get it back on the track. Every movement needs to be choreographed, every person needs to know their role. But every race brings unpredictable conditions.

How on earth do you keep yourself competitive? Precision planning and the ability to adapt in real time have to go hand in hand.

So Formula one in this respect is a powerful metaphor for leadership. The balance between how we use structure and agility, planning and improvisation.

It's a system built on learning loops, feedback and constant refinement. But here's the twist. Whilst F1 teams thrive on adaptability, many organizations don't.

Leaders often get trapped by their own success systems, which could be KPIs. They could get obsessed with those rigid goal setting or left brain logic that prioritises productivity over progress.

These habits create efficiency, yes, but not always effectiveness. And they can, if not careful, make leadership very mechanical rather than dynamic and responsive. So this is where the terms agile and lean come in.

Not as technical frameworks used by IT teams or project teams, but more as solutions. Focus in action. And those of you listening to our recent podcast know we did a whole topic of solutions focused in a recent podcast.

Agile and Lean invite us to move from problem fixing to potential seeking, from rigid control to continuous learning. So we see agile and lean as leadership mindsets, not methodologies.

They become tools for building teams that can flex, adapt and thrive under pressure. Just like the F1 pit crew I was talking about.

So in this episode, Rich, let's explore how leaders can find that sweet spot when precision meets adaptability. And how letting go of rigid left brain thinking opens up a more creative, resilient way to perform and lead.

So, Rich, this whole idea of solutions, focus and action using these lean and agile mindsets I'd like to get your take on that, please.

Yeah, so we're going to talk about this in relation to F1, so apologies to those of you that are not F1 fans. I'm a big F1 fan, so I'm going to talk about F1, but just use it as a metaphor around leadership.

And I'll try to talk about F1 and not bore you, but try to talk about F1 in a way that's accessible to you, even if you don't know the sport.

I'm also going to share my view on some of the teams within F1, and it's just purely my subjective view and my observations of what's happening in F1, and those of you out there might disagree with my interpretation. So please do share your disagreements with us on, on LinkedIn and that sort of stuff when we post this podcast out. But we're just using this.

The idea of F1 and some of the teams in F1 is a bit of a case study. So, you know, bite off the fish and spit out the bones in terms of what I have to say. But, you know, focus on the.

On the key lessons as opposed to, you know, you. Yeah, you're bound to disagree with some of my interpretations of what's going on.

I think that's like all of our podcasts, rich people are going to take from it what they want to take from it. Sometimes people will agree with everything we said, sometimes they won't. That's fine. It creates learning.

So my point here was about solutions, focus in action. How does that come across to you? What does that mean to you?

So I think we've talked about whole brain thinking in the past and the need to balance left brain versus right brain thinking, upper brain versus lower brain thinking thinking. I'm going to talk particularly about left and right brain because it's easier to. More accessible to talk, to, talk about.

But inside organizations, if you've got fixation on KPIs and targets and productivity, all that sort of stuff, the danger is you become, you know, rigidly fixed on those things and you're not prepared to think differently, think creatively and think innovatively about things. So what we're trying to encourage here is balancing left brain, right brain thinking.

Yeah.

Being prepared to be flexible around what's going on around you, engage your curiosity, look at. Look at things differently, encourage team creativity and flexibility and don't get so fixated on, you know, data, information, etc.

So it's very interesting, I think, because F1 obviously is a very data driven sport. Yeah, you know, so, so the measures, the data and all those things are really important parts of those teams making really good decisions.

But the best teams don't get locked into the data and you know, they plug in their curiosity, their creativity, their intuition.

So it's very interesting in F1 races sometimes you will see the data balanced against rider intuition and good teams know when one overrides the other. You know, so that's an example where we're actually having a balanced, flexible, open approach to this is really important.

Sometimes you hear it when you watch F1, you hear those conversations, don't you, with the pit crew talking to the driver and the driver talking back. I guess that's what you're talking about because the pit crew are responding maybe to data they've got, and they've got lots of it, as you said.

Whereas the driver is sat in the car and knows exactly how the car feels, he knows the race conditions that he's driving in, etc.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And sometimes, and this is where the trick is, sometimes the data will tell the teams something that the driver doesn't know about, you know, so the data will have its own, own perspective, its own view, the driver will have its own view and the best teams know which actually do we need to pay attention to in this moment?

And that's why it's worth, I think, just reframing those two terms, agile and lean, in terms of leadership methodology, because it ties into what you're talking about. Agile means adaptability in motion.

It's responding to that real time feedback, whether that's coming from data or coming from experience on the track, in the case of what we're talking about here. But learning fast and evolving as that situation is changing in front of you, which F1 is the epitome of this, isn't it?

Because it's happening in such fast time as well, lean on the other hand, reframed means efficiency and intention. So it's cutting through the clutter of all this stuff going on. So in leadership terms that would be meetings, reports, all the metrics, etc.

To focus your energy on what truly creates value. Now I guess in F1 terms what creates value is where you finish at the end of the race and the points that you get.

Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah. I mean, let me give some examples around agile and lean in the context of F1, just to sort of bring those concepts to life.

So when we talk about agile, what we mean here is the ability to continuously learn yeah. So for example, really good F1 teams.

Well, all F1 teams will have a debriefing session, you know, so at the end of the race what they will all do is have a debriefing session to work out what went wrong and what they could do differently next time. The best teams learn, park their ego at the same time. Yeah, because it's really interesting in those contexts.

You know, you can have your debrief sessions and your lessons learned, but if it's just a box ticking exercise, you're not going to get any value from it.

So agile means really listening, really listening to the feedback you're getting and being prepared to park all your stuff, all your assumptions, all your belief, all your ego around that and be prepared to make a different decision and to take responsibility for your part in whether, you know, in F1 terms to take responsibility for your part in you not having a good race.

For example, I wonder if, because we talked in the past about courage and having the courage of your convictions being quite important in leadership and sometimes I guess, can we be, I think your point, we can always be almost too reliant on the data because the data says this. Therefore I'm not willing to be courageous and make a different decision. But actually sometimes you need to.

Sometimes the data isn't the whole story, is it?

Yeah, and that's, and that's the term.

The term agile is the ability to turn on a sixpence, to use an ODE expression, and to be prepared to do something differently and to be flexible enough to do that. So that's the term agile. The term lean is slightly different. So the term agile and lean are often put together but they're two very different things.

So the term lean, as you said, is the ability to cut through all the crap, you know, to cut through all the nonsense.

There's a really interesting example of that in F1 recently where the Williams racing team for years now have been really underperforming, doing really badly and just getting caught up in poor performance.

And I think it's difficult to know without being on the inside, but I suspect that some of the legacy around the Williams teams racing got in the way of making courageous decisions and doing things very differently. So it was interesting to watch James Vowles, who's now the new team principal inside Williams Racing.

He came in and he is ruthlessly and rigorously focused on the important things.

Right, okay.

So making good engineering decisions, using data effectively, having good pit stops, all of those things. He's got back to the basics and he Sort of rebuilt the team from the bottom up and almost like, you know, almost like ignored the legacy.

You know, he has been respectful to the legacy of, you know, Frank Williams and all that sort of stuff because it was a family run business until quite recently. But he's come in and he's just focused on what's important and what's going to deliver results for us.

And I think that's a really good example of lean cutting through the crap and focus on the important stuff.

Yeah, I've got a little sound bite here which I think summarises what you said quite nicely actually. Agility without direction can just be chaos.

Lean without flexibility involves stagnation and I think that just sums up what you were talking about there.

Yeah, but actually if you blend the two things, if you've got agility with direction, you've got lean with flexibility, then actually that's where performance, acceleration can really, really happen. And I guess what you're saying is they're starting to go back in the right direction now using those, those two things properly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And not getting locked in the past, not getting locked into, you know, this is the way we've always done things.

I think it's been really important for Williams to move forward.

In contrast, I think as a case study, the Ferrari team are a very interesting team in terms of where all the legacy and all the stuff and all the branding is getting in the way of actually making, you know, important decisions.

Because those of you that have followed F1 in the last couple of years will know recently Lewis Hammerson has joined Ferrari seven time world champion. Okay. And he's having a torrid year in Ferrari and Ferrari are not doing well.

And I suspect that there's real inertia built in inside the culture and the systems and the processes of Ferrari.

You know, so they're very passionate, very proud of their brand and I think that's brought a rigidity to the way they do things and a sense of inertia that I think the current team principal is struggling to cut through all of that. Lewis Hamilton has come in.

Apparently he produced this dossier fairly early on when he was with Ferrari, identifying all the things that he thought was, was an issue with the systems and the processes and the culture inside Ferrari. And I don't think Ferrari have listened very much to him and are not changing now.

You would think he's come from a, one of the most successful teams in F1 in the history of F1. He's a seven time world champion so why wouldn't you listen to him?

Well, exactly, yeah.

And I think, you know, this is why we've got to see this management fads not as methodology, but as very clear ways of thinking and leading that keeps teams learning, keeps them adapting and keeps them thriving.

It sounds like you've got some examples there of teams that haven't done that and therefore they're falling behind and other teams that are doing it are taking the lead. But to be at the top of a sport like that consistently, you do surely have to learn, you have to adapt, you have to do those things to thrive.

So I'd like to unpack this case study of. I think this is a good case study, Formula one.

And I know you can talk about this for hours and hours, but we've only got half an hour here, Rich, so let's be succinct if we can. So why do you think Formula one racing is a masterclass of solutions focused in action?

If you could just sort of give us a bit more of a reason why you think that's the case.

Yeah, I think in a lot of businesses, results are often not tied to action in real time. Sometimes they are, sometimes they are.

But often if you're working inside a large organization, you're probably part of large projects, large initiatives that take months and months or even years to come to fruition. So what you're doing today, what you're doing right now, it's not always easy to see the direct results of that in action.

I think what's interesting in F1 is clearly there are long term projects and goals and aspirations inside F1 because actually in F1 at the moment there's a huge regulation change that's happening next year.

So the that all the teams have been working for the last two years on those new regulations behind the scenes, but actually week in, week out, they are measured against the stopwatch. And the stopwatch doesn't lie.

Yeah.

So it's an incredibly results driven sport. I guess football is sort of similar in some ways. So the most successful teams are really agile and flexible.

They're prepared to learn and as I said, sort of turn on a sixpence. So in other words, they're prepared to change direction and they ruthlessly focus on the stuff that's important and make decisions around that.

So I think that's perhaps why F1 is a good case study for this, because it's balanced in some of those long term projects with actually you need to get stuff right week in, week out. And I guess that still happens inside bigger organizations.

But often in bigger organizations you don't have a stopwatch literally hanging above you at your desk. Sometimes we do, but it's not quite the same.

No, you don't. But take the football analogy, I think, which is a good one and I think it's very similar. You know, there's a pressure to get points, every team.

So my team plays in the championship, which is a really, really strong division. It's one below the Premier League, but, you know, still a really high level of football.

Every team wants to get promoted to the Premier League, every team is under pressure to get points. You can't all win. Someone's got to win, someone's got to lose.

The two I support, we've had horrendous start to the season with most of our best players that we would pick as first choice being injured at some point and some out long term.

But what we've got is a manager who's willing to, rather than just stick to his principles and not bend, is be agile in his thinking, agile in his tactics.

And actually, you know, we've got to the point where we are here today in mid November where we're fourth in the table despite having had a horrendous injury problem which is now hopefully easing. But you can only do that if you've got some agile thinking and you're willing to think differently because the conditions around you have changed.

And I think that's the important thing, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think it's interesting F1 that the Mercedes team are really interesting case study around agility because I've been a real fan of Mercedes and you know, I really like Toto Wolff who's the team principal there. I like, I like his leadership star, I like the, the no blame culture that he introduced into Mercedes that's, and he's not ego driven.

So there's a lot to admire around the way Toto Wolff has set up Mercedes and essentially it produced a team that gave Lewis Hamilton the car to be essentially a seven time world champion, you know, so it's had real success as a team. So interestingly, a number of years ago there was a massive regulation change in F1. It introduced what was called the Ground Effect era.

And the Mercedes response to that was they came to the first testing session in the, in that new era with quite an innovative looking car that looked very different than the rest of the cars in the field. Okay. And I remember that first testing session, all the drivers were gathering around the Mercedes thinking, wow, that looks amazing.

And it was Terrible. The car was terrible.

Oh, right, okay.

It was truly awful. Okay.

And I think one of the mistakes Mercedes have made in the recent era because they've not been so successful in recent times, and I think it's one of the reasons that Lewis Hamilton left Mercedes to go to Ferrari is I think they stuck with that concept for far too long. My understanding was Lewis Hamilton was telling them in quite the early days, fundamentally I think this concept is wrong. Okay.

And the people didn't believe him. They believed that their car, the fundamental design of their car, if they could just get it right, would be a world leading car.

And it never has happened.

Okay.

And they got to, I think it was a couple of years in where actually they had to just say we're just going to have to focus on the next set of regulations and just make do with what we've got.

Right, okay, interesting.

So for a team that had prided itself on being really agile and learning and being really open and a leadership that, that lived that out and I think they truly did, I think they did make one big error around agility and they locked themselves into thinking this is a fabulous car and it's gonna. And they got so fixated on just. And they didn't listen to the people around them.

There's a difference between rigid planning though, and structure and discipline.

Now, I don't know F1 as well as you do, but I'm guessing that those pit crews, they rehearse those routines that they do thousands of times until they've got it, an absolute, what people call muscle memory. You know, it's almost subconsciously, I'm competent at it.

Their roles are probably very defined, responsibilities are very clear and their processes are refined through to the endless iterations so that they know at any given time who's responsible, who's accountable for what, and they just, they can then deliver in those really high pressure environments. And that's, that's lean thinking in action. So there's a lot of structure and discipline behind it.

But to take your point, it's not rigid thinking where we don't bring in some agility in the way that we then respond to what's going on around us.

So I think the Mercedes team is a really interesting case study around agility. And I think the lesson in leadership is to think is to know when to stick with your principles and your values and your vision.

You know, to have the resilience to see something through and to stick with the discomfort and to, you know, to ignore the naysayers. There are Times to do that.

There are times to do that, but at the same time actually to accept, well, maybe actually we're barking at the wrong tree here and you know, we just need to park our egos and to accept we've not got it quite right and do something different.

Yeah.

And I also think the lesson to learn from F1 is whether your strategy is right or wrong because sometimes it takes a little bit of time to find that out. But get that structure and discipline right, make sure you've got clearly defined roles, clearly defined accountabilities, clearly defined processes.

If they're not working, change them clearly. But a lot of businesses don't even have those things in place to the level that they need to.

And I think that's a good learning from what F1 probably does quite well in many cases. And then off the back of that you can then use your agile thinking as all that stuff around you.

And in F1 there's all sorts of things I'd imagine it's unpredictable, the weather, whether your tyres are degrading during a race, you might have a safety car come out because someone's crashed. There's all sorts of things that go on in an F1 race, isn't there? And you've got to respond to that in the moment and that's not easy.

Yeah, yeah. So I think agile thinking, there's a couple of things I would say so in terms of decision making, make sure that you learn fast and adjust as you go.

Yeah, okay. Yeah.

So you know, that's being prepared to listen to feedback, to have regular lessons learned and to be prepared to do something differently, you know, so make sure in terms of your decision making that you learn fast and adjust as you go. Think about your team culture inside your team.

Actually, do you empower and trust people and in those conversations where you're having lessons learned, actually is it okay for people to challenge and just to say I think we got this completely wrong and then how do you respond to the feedback in that context as a leader, those little micro behaviours in terms of how you respond to those feedback, how you manage those debrief sessions, how you manage your one to ones, all of those things, all of those micro behaviors create the culture that allow you to be, to be agile.

I think it's also from a strategic perspective, if you're going to have an agile thinking sort of culture inside your business is I think it's important to be prepared to evolve your goals. So it's all well and good having a strategy that's written in a document, you know, that's sitting up on a shelf.

But we all know that things change, you know, the society changes, the economic climate changes, all of those things shift. And being prepared to not get locked in to that strategy document that you wrote three years ago and be prepared to evolve your goals.

And I think the final thing is think about, you know, from a self awareness perspective. Are you prepared to reflect, are you prepared to adapt?

And are you prepared to listen to the feedback of others and not get locked into your own ego around this?

Because it's very easy to tie our sense of identity to the goals and the vision that we think we've established and then we think we're a failure or we'll look bad because we decided to do something different.

Yeah, I think the point you made about goals, it's, and making them more dynamic is a really important one. And also how you marry that with some instinct and some intuition.

Because I think the story you told about Lewis Hamilton, which I didn't know, but yeah, there's a guy who is really experienced now, he's one more F1 championships than borrow one person, anybody in history.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

The guy should know what he's talking about and surely there's an argument to say, well we need to take in his intuitive responses here and do something with them.

Not just go with a strategy, go with some, you know, metrics, how do you measure, marry those two things together and that, that's the trick of good leadership again, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think Mercedes actually managed data and intuition really well at the height of when they were really successful.

Lewis Hamilton had a chief race engineer called bono. Not from U2. Yeah, don't know why they called him Bono but anyway he was called Bono. It's really interesting actually that Bono is a race engineer.

Obviously was very data driven, highly intelligent person and you know, really good at making really good decisions.

But the really interesting thing to watch the two of them work together was Lewis is quite an emotional person and you know, some people find that a little bit annoying and all.

He wears his heart on his sleeve but he's highly emotional, highly intuitive and it's really interesting that Toto Wolff and Bono used to value his intuitive inputs even in the middle of a race, you know, okay, so they were balanced data and intuition and it's almost like they had this uncanny ability to know actually let's listen to Lewis in this situation and allow him, trust him to make the decision in the moment or actually when to know, to override a seven time world champion and say no, the data says this, this is what we're doing. And it's a tricky thing to get right in leadership. When to trust your intuition and when to trust the data.

When to, you know, to drive to achieve the goal you want to do and you know when to let go.

That's why I think this F1 case study is quite a good analogy, a good metaphor really for leadership. Because.

Because I think you made the point this morning that in F1, success isn't about executing a plan perfectly, it's about improving it in real time. And that's true of the best leaders, all the best teams, they balance structure with adaptability, data with dialogue and precision with learning.

And I think that's the point you'll make. So for leaders, you have a pit crew. It's the team that you manage, it's the team that you lead.

Yeah.

You've got some systems, I dare say you've got some KPIs that provide some degree of structure, but you've also got to have that openness to feedback.

You've got to focus on collaboration and then adaptability because that's what's going to keep you competitive in this really competitive environment we're now working and living in.

Yeah, yeah. So just to finish off this podcast, I'll just give my final reflections around lean thinking. So we talk about agile thinking.

Yeah.

From a leadership perspective. So you know, the decision making, the team culture, the strategy execution and you know, personal effectiveness.

Yeah.

So I'd like, I'd like to think about lean thinking from those four perspectives, from a leadership perspective. So, you know, really good lean thinking person from a decision making point of view. They cut through and they don't get paralyzed by data.

Very interesting. The Williams Racing as a case study.

James Vowles, who interestingly came from Mercedes and he essentially grew up with Toto Wolff as his manager, basically. And he learned a lot about Toto Wolff, what James Valves has proved really effective at. He's a very data driven person.

He's a very data driven person, but he knows how to cut through all the, all the data and to make key important decisions. So from a decision making point of view, he doesn't get paralyzed by the data. Okay.

He's gone into a team that culturally were very tied up around the brand of Williams and their legacy and all that sort of stuff and he's just cut through all of that. Okay. And he's focused the on stuff that's really important.

So he's eliminated all those friction points and just really focused on this is what we're focusing on now and this is our team culture and this is our set of values. So he's been quite brave, I think, in terms of how he's done that.

And from a strategy execution point of view, he's really focused on what adds most value. So it's been very interesting.

They were one of the first teams over the last couple of years that have almost stopped development on their current car and he, you know, so they just say, that's good enough. We're going to get what we can and make the best of we can of that car. No more upgrades.

We're going to focus all our resources now on the new regulations. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and hopefully. And apparently the rumors are behind the scenes, they're one of the teams that quite, quite a way forward.

I mean, we don't know yet, but, you know, so. So he very quickly got into the team, say, right, okay, stop development now. We're going to focus on next year. We just get the best out of the car.

And he's focusing on things like pit stops and all that sort of stuff, decision making in races, getting that important stuff right. And not worrying too much about being first this season because there's no way they're going to do that.

Yeah.

And I think he's embodied that.

So from a personal effectiveness point of view, he's modelled focusing on the important stuff, not getting super stressed out and just focus on the important things. And I think he's a great leader, actually.

James Vowles, he's one of those quiet figures inside F1 that has made some monumental shifts of culture inside Williams Racing.

Interesting.

Yeah, yeah, really interesting.

I'm just going to recap for listeners here. You've made some really good points there about what?

Four key parts of leadership, which is decision making, team culture, strategy execution and personal effectiveness. So let's just look at both of those. Sorry. Let's just look at all of those four from the agile and lean perspective and just recap.

So what you're saying with decision making, the agile thinking part of that is you learn fast, adjust as you go, but the lean thinking side of it is cut through that analysis paralysis that sometimes we have. Yeah. Team culture, empower people, trust iterate as you go.

Yeah.

But eliminate friction and waste. That's the lean part of it. With strategy execution, evolve your goals through feedback. That's the agile bit, but focus on what adds most value.

That's the lean bit. And lastly, as an as a personal effectiveness tool, agile thinking, reflect, adapt and improve yourself.

But the lean thinking is simplify and streamline where necessary.

Now, I think that as a set of learning points from that case study, if we could all do a bit more of all those things, that would make us a better leader, wouldn't it?

Yes, it would. It would, absolutely.

Yeah. Just pick up on a couple of common misconceptions to anybody listening to this.

Rich, I know you've worked in an IT environment as head of an IT team, so you've probably worked with lean and agile to a certain extent in that environment particularly. But in leadership in general, the myth that agile means chaos, is that true?

No, it's just about balancing structure with flexibility.

Right.

Okay. So our connected leadership model is all about balancing things.

You know, there's a lot of paradoxes in leadership, and agile is one of those where you actually act a balance. Structure and flexibility, the two things pull against each other.

It's not an excuse for chaos then.

No.

Here's another myth then. Lean means cutting people or doing more with less. Is that a myth?

Yeah. Well, I think again, it's about, it's about improving and doing things better. Okay, but the flip side of that coin, again, this is another paradox.

So do better, but do it with focus.

Right.

Okay. So you know, you know what, what's really important, what will add, what will add most value.

And I guess the last myth, which we've touched on, lean and agile thinking, is just for people who work in IT projects or manufacturing.

Well, hopefully from today's podcast, you know, we've used F1 as an analogy and a case study, but hopefully you'll see the applicability to that to all areas of leadership from today.

I would hope so too. I think it is a good case study to learn from. So Rich, in a fast moving business landscape that we now find ourselves in.

The leaders who I guess are successful aren't always those with the most detailed plan, but the ones who can pivot and have got a good strong sense of purpose. So what would be your actionable takeaways, your top tips for anybody listening to this podcast today?

So three things probably occur to me. I think. Stop. Stop. Continue.

Yeah.

Is a really useful tool to introduce into relevant meetings and projects. So every now and again with the, with your team review, what should we stop doing, what should we start to do and what should we continue to do?

So the stop doing that's cutting through, you know, all the flim flam that you're wasting your time on. So stop doing that. Be rigorous about that.

Perhaps there's some things that are really important you're not doing, and there's some really important things actually you continue to do. So start, stop, continue.

Yeah.

The second one, I mean, I did this quite often when I was in it is just have regular retrospective meetings, you know, so whether you tie that into operational milestones or project milestones, just have times, sort of a, you know, natural rhythms inside your operational framework or your project management framework, where you just have regular lessons learned meetings.

And there's three basic questions there, isn't there? What's working, what didn't work, and what do we do next? I think that again, it's just simple questions really, to ask.

Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So make your priorities your priorities.

So what I mean by that is sometimes I talk to teams and you ask them what their priorities are and they give you a spreadsheet with pages and pages of these are our priorities. So by definition, if it's pages and pages long, it can't be priorities, can they? No, because it's pretty much everything you're doing.

So I think really effective leaders have the ability to really hone in on the important stuff and to focus on the real priorities and to stop doing the stuff that's not important. So make sure your priorities are your priorities.

I think that's three really good tips. Rich, run the stop, start, continue thinking. Yeah, that's a very simple.

You can always do that daily, certainly do it weekly, have some short feedback loops. So those retrospectives with your team where you're talking about what's worked, what didn't work, what next? I think that's really useful as well.

And try and get into this sense of flow. But like you said, stop making everything important and everything urgent and everything a priority, because if everything is, nothing is.

And I think that's a really important concept. So anything else as a closing reflection, Rich, before I wrap this up?

No. No, that's it. That's it. Thank you.

Okay, so for listeners, thank you for listening today. In F1, success is measured in milliseconds, but in leadership, it's measured in the momentum that you create and the ripples that you create.

The best leaders aren't rigid planners or reckless improvisers. They're agile and lean thinkers who balance precision with adaptability.

And hopefully you've picked that up from the conversation I've had with Rich today. So if you're listening to this this week ahead, can you think like an F1 strategist or an innovator, structure your plan, stay ready to pivot.

Because leadership ability is not about moving fast, it's about moving smart. So that's it for today, Rich. I know in the next podcast, we're going to deep dive into goal setting, healthy goal setting.

So not just the pitfalls of goal setting, but also what makes a healthy goal setting culture. So that's something for next week. For now, have a great week being agile and lean.

Thank you.

Thank you.