Last night I watched a film called Girlfriend Day, about a man who writes greeting cards for a living, the sappy, sentimental Hallmark kind that somehow still make people cry in the aisle. His marriage had ended a few years ago, and for the first time in his career he couldn’t write a single meaningful line. Every card came out hollow or cheesy or even desperate. What struck me wasn’t the writer’s block itself, it was what eventually broke it. Falling in love again, badly and honestly, finally gave him a card so good that two competing companies ended up fighting over it.

Growing up, I used to buy and/or make actual cards for the people I cared about. Then in the late nineties, Blue Mountain digital cards arrived, and suddenly a card could be sent in ten seconds instead of an afternoon. It felt like magic at the time. Looking back, I think it was the first lesson in a pattern we’re still living through, where the tool that saves us the trip to the store also, almost invisibly, saves us the searching, the struggling, the version of ourselves that only shows up when we’re forced to sit with a hard feeling until it finds its own words.

The convenience trap

We’re living through a much bigger version of that same moment now, where almost any process can be handed off, from strategy decks to birthday messages to the eulogy nobody wants to write at midnight. None of this is inherently wrong, and I’ll admit I use these tools myself, often gratefully, when they save me a Tuesday afternoon I’d genuinely rather spend elsewhere. In fact, this very post started as my outline, a handful of half formed thoughts, before AI helped me turn it into something readable. I’m not a writer and writing is simply the medium I use to market what I actually make, which is art based journeys, so I’ve made a kind of peace with letting the tool carry the sentences while I carry the meaning.

However, convenience has a habit of quietly expanding past its original job description. It starts with the report nobody enjoyed writing anyway, and it ends, if we’re not paying attention, with us outsourcing the very parts of work that used to build our judgment in the first place, the wrestling with an unclear problem, the false start, the sentence rewritten four times because some quieter part of you knew it wasn’t true yet.

Researchers who study expertise have found that struggle isn’t a design flaw in learning, it’s the mechanism. Which means the wrestling was never inefficiency dressed up as effort. It was the thing itself, the process by which craft, taste, and self-knowledge get built in the first place. The card writer in that film couldn’t shortcut his way to a line worth fighting over. He had to actually break, and then actually heal, before the words meant anything again.

A shared question, three different lives

This shows up differently depending on where you sit, but it shows up everywhere.

If you’re employed, the pressure tends to arrive as speed. Everyone now expects a polished first draft within minutes, so the muscle you’d use to sit patiently with an unclear problem gets less practice than it used to, and like any muscle, it quietly weakens from disuse.

If you’re self employed, it tends to arrive as volume. You can now produce ten times what you once could, so you do, and somewhere inside that flood of output, your actual voice, the thing that made people want to hire you rather than a competitor, gets harder to locate, even for you.

If you’re semi retired, it arrives more quietly still. The processes you’re stepping back from, the meetings, the decisions, the constant producing, were often what gave your days their shape. Handing even more of that off doesn’t necessarily hand you back freedom. Sometimes it just hands you a quieter mind that doesn’t quite know what to do.

Three very different lives, and yet one question underneath all of them: when the doing gets easier, what happens to the part of us that used to do it?

Making as a way back in

Whether I’m designing a leadership programme or planning a slow journey through a place I love, I lean on a simple framework: Place, Mind, Making.

Place is wherever your attention actually lands once you’ve stepped away from the feed and the inbox. Mind is whatever surfaces when you’re no longer performing for an audience. Making is the proof that you were genuinely there, a sketch, a written page, a conversation you couldn’t have had over email because it needed your full, undivided, slightly uncomfortable attention.

None of it is efficient, and I’ve stopped apologizing for that. All of it is where the self-knowledge lives that no tool can generate on your behalf, because it was never a form of information to begin with. It was always a form of practice, closer to what that card writer did with his own broken heart than to anything a machine can produce on command.

An invitation, not a rule

I’m not arguing for nostalgia, and I’m certainly not arguing that we refuse the tools now available to us. What I am arguing for is keeping a few minutes in your week where nothing gets outsourced, where the slow, occasionally clumsy work of thinking, making, and noticing still belongs entirely to you.

That’s part of why Slow Lines exists. It’s a deliberate return to the kind of attention that builds a person rather than just fills a schedule. Some things really are worth doing the long way.

What’s one process in your week you’d never hand off, no matter how good the tools get?

Only 20% of HR leaders say they have leaders ready to fill their most critical roles. That number should stop most boards mid-meeting but it rarely does.

According to Harvard Business Review, poorly managed CEO transitions wipe out nearly $1 trillion in market value each year among S&P 1500 companies alone.

Transitions handled badly enough to destroy value at a scale that should make succession planning one of the most urgent items on any board agenda.

Succession planning still gets treated, in practice, as an HR exercise rather than the financial decision it actually is.

Why the Gap Persists

The paradox is familiar to most leadership teams. Organizations want to promote from within, but there is a shortage of leaders who are ready now and many companies lack the structures needed to prepare the next generation of leaders effectively.

The shortage is rarely a talent problem, rather, a common pitfall, identified across leadership advisory firms working in this space, is treating succession planning as an annual exercise, equating strong performance with readiness for the next level, and underestimating transition risk.

A high performer in their current role is not automatically ready for the next one but organisations consistently behave as though competence in one job is sufficient evidence of readiness for a different, larger one.

The more effective approach, increasingly adopted by organisations navigating this shift, focuses on developing leaders for a range of future scenarios rather than a single role.

When succession planning is built around critical leadership behaviours such as strategic thinking, analytical judgment, and ownership that are generalisable across functions, the pool of genuinely promotable individuals expands significantly. The shift is from rigid replacement charts to a deeper, more flexible bench.

The Malaysian Context

Across Southeast Asia, rapid economic growth has consistently outpaced talent development pipelines, and succession planning has historically been weak, creating more demand for capable mid-level and senior leaders than the market can supply.

Large turnover at the mid-executive level is directly linked to poor internal succession practices, when companies fail to develop their own people into these roles, they enter the external market competing for the same small pool everyone else is fighting over. 

For Malaysian organisations, this dynamic has a specific local edge. Recent regulatory changes have raised the cost of hiring foreign executives substantially, and roles above a certain threshold now require formal succession plans mandating knowledge transfer to local hires, effectively placing a contractual expiry date on imported expertise.

The message from policy is unambiguous: organisations that have relied on bringing in external leadership talent rather than developing their own pipeline are going to find that strategy considerably more expensive, and in some cases no longer viable.

Building the Bench Before You Need It

Succession planning has evolved from a back-burner HR process to a critical business imperative. Organisations without clear strategies risk significant disruption to productivity and profitability and the most effective organisations are adopting agile, living frameworks rather than the static succession plans of the past, with continuous talent mapping and quarterly reviews becoming standard practice.

What this means practically for any organisation serious about its leadership pipeline:

Move beyond the spreadsheet. A list of names next to job titles is not a succession plan. It is a static snapshot that goes stale the moment circumstances change. The shift underway across the most effective organisations is toward comparability at scale – consistent, observable, role-relevant evidence of readiness, not assumptions based on tenure or current performance.

Start earlier than feels necessary. Succession planning is expanding earlier in the pipeline, with increased focus on identifying potential at frontline and mid-level leadership stages, in direct response to talent scarcity and attrition risk. By the time a senior role opens unexpectedly, it is too late to begin building the person who should fill it.

Develop for capability, not just role.

The organisations building the deepest benches are not asking “who could replace this specific person in this specific role.” They are asking “who has the judgment, the self-awareness, and the adaptive capacity to lead well, regardless of which seat they eventually occupy.”

The Board-Level Question

Most boards ask their CEO how the business performed last quarter. Far fewer ask a harder, more consequential question: if you left tomorrow, who is ready and how do you know?

The organisations that can answer that question with confidence are the ones that decided, years before they needed to, that developing leadership capability was not a cost to be minimised but a structural investment in the organisation’s ability to survive its own success.

The $1 trillion is already being lost in transitions that were entirely foreseeable. The only real question is whether your organisation’s name will be part of that number.

Where to Start

For organisations not yet ready to commit to a full leadership programme, BEP runs masterclasses for associations and professional bodies, designed as an accessible entry point for members from medium and large organisations who want to experience what genuine leadership development looks like before committing to something longer.

These sessions are led by people who have actually held the roles they are speaking about, practitioners from industry who can speak to the real judgment calls behind the slide. It is a low-commitment way to test whether this approach is the right fit for your organisation, before stepping into a full-scale programme built around your specific leadership pipeline.

If your association or organisation is exploring how to start building leadership capability with more intent, get in touch.

Few phrases do more work in an office than “it’s fine.”

Sometimes it is simply true – a small thing happened, it was handled, there is nothing more to say but “it’s fine” can also be doing the work of an entire conversation that hasn’t happened. The feedback that felt risky to give. The disagreement that got smoothed over rather than resolved. The deadline that is technically met but at a cost nobody has mentioned yet.

The difficulty is that “it’s fine” sounds identical in both cases. There is no tone of voice written into a WhatsApp message, no way to tell from the words alone whether “fine” means resolved or merely postponed.

This is not a reason to interrogate every “it’s fine” you hear as that would make trust impossible but it is worth noticing when “it’s fine” follows something that would normally warrant more for example a difficult meeting, a missed deadline, a tense exchange. In those moments, a simple follow-up “fine in what way?” or “anything I should know about?” costs very little and occasionally surfaces something that would otherwise have stayed buried until it was much harder to address.

This is one small example of something much larger. Every sentence we speak is a compressed version of something larger. Our minds can’t transmit every detail of an experience, so we filter and three filters do most of the work: deletion, generalisation, and distortion.

Deletion: What Got Left Out

Deletion is the process where parts of an experience are selectively filtered out in order to handle the present situation. This can be useful in a noisy meeting or deleting background chatter that helps you focus on the person in front of you. However, it can also remove information that someone else needed.

In the office, deletion shows up constantly. A team member returns from a client call and reports, “It went well.” This is technically true and almost entirely unhelpful. What went well? What was discussed? Were there any concerns raised, even minor ones? The deletion isn’t dishonest (the person genuinely experienced the call as going well) but the compressed version strips out everything you might need to know.

Another common example: “I sent you the file.” True. But which file, when, and did it include the revisions discussed in yesterday’s meeting? The sentence is complete grammatically. It is incomplete informationally. 

The fix is not to demand more detail from everyone constantly as that would be exhausting. It is to develop a habit of asking specific, open questions when a decision depends on the missing information: “What specifically did the client say about the pricing?” “Which version of the file – the one with Tuesday’s changes to the SOPs?”

Generalisation: One Becomes All

Generalisation is the process by which we create categories or classes from single examples, organising specific experiences into broader patterns. This is, in many ways, how learning works. We generalise from a few experiences to form useful rules about the world but generalisations formed from limited data can become beliefs that shape behaviour long after the original evidence has been forgotten. 

In a team setting, this often sounds like: “Marketing never gets back to us on time.” Perhaps this happened twice, six months ago, with a since-departed team member but the generalisation has hardened into “marketing never,” and now every interaction with that the remaining team members is approached with quiet resentment that nobody can quite explain.

Or: “Leadership doesn’t listen to feedback.” One proposal was declined, for reasons that were never properly communicated, and from that single data point an entire belief about how the organisation operates has formed, one that now shapes whether people bother raising ideas at all.

The useful move here is simple but often uncomfortable: when you hear an absolute “never, always, everyone, no one”, it is worth gently asking what specifically happened, and when. Not to dismiss the feeling, but to locate the actual evidence underneath the generalisation, where it can be examined and, if needed, updated.

Distortion: The Story We Tell About What Happened

Distortion occurs when information is twisted in a way that limits choice and creates problems that may not actually exist. One common form is what’s sometimes called mind reading for example claiming to know what someone else is thinking, feeling, or intending, with no direct evidence for it.

This is everywhere in office life. A manager doesn’t respond to an email within a few hours, and the recipient concludes: “They’re annoyed with me.” There may be no evidence for this at all and the manager might simply be in back-to-back meetings but the distortion becomes the operating reality for the rest of the day. The recipient might become more cautious, more guarded, less willing to raise the next issue, all in response to a story that was never confirmed.

Another common distortion in the workplace is the presupposition, an unspoken assumption embedded in a statement. “This project will fail” or “the client won’t understand” both carry assumptions that go unexamined. Spotting the presupposition means asking: what assumption is being made here, and is there any actual basis for it? 

A related pattern is what’s called nominalisation eg turning an active, ongoing process into a fixed, static thing. Instead of describing how two people are currently interacting, someone might say “their relationship is broken” and treating something dynamic as though it were a permanent, unchangeable object.

“The team has no trust” sounds like a diagnosis of a fixed condition. In reality, trust is built through specific interactions over time which means it can also be rebuilt through specific interactions over time. The nominalisation obscures that possibility. 

Why This Matters for Leaders

None of this means people are communicating badly, or that language should somehow capture everything. That would be impossible, and exhausting. The point is simpler: every sentence you hear in a meeting, every status update, every “it’s fine” or “they’re not happy” or “this always happens” is a compressed version of something larger. The compression is necessary but it is also where misunderstanding lives.

The most effective leaders develop a habit of noticing when a sentence might be hiding more than it’s showing and asking, with genuine curiosity rather than suspicion, what is underneath it. Not every sentence, of course, that would make every conversation an interrogation, but the ones that matter, the ones a decision rests on, the ones that carry an absolute or an assumption, the ones that sound like a fixed verdict rather than a description of something that happened.

The gap between what was said and what actually happened is where most workplace misunderstandings live and most of them are never caused by anyone lying. They are simply the ordinary cost of turning experience into language.

Photo Credit

I remember a time when I was presenting an event proposal to a client. All the details were there but one particular person couldn’t understand how it would look like on the actual day. The top view layout plan didn’t make sense to him. I figured he was a very visual person and I had to create a 3D visual for him before he understood. That was the day I realised that people process information differently. There is an old Cantonese saying for this: 鸡同鸭讲 — the chicken talking to the duck. Two creatures, same farmyard, completely different languages. Nobody is wrong. Nobody is stupid. They simply cannot hear each other.

So let’s get back to how this takes place in the workplace. You have delivered a clear and well designed presentation explaining a project strategy for the next 6 months. At the end of the presentation you asked if there were questions and nobody had any.

Two weeks later, an argument takes place between two department heads, each blaming each other for not delivering something in their control.

They both got the same message during the presentation but somehow they missed each other’s “bridge”.

This happens because different people primarily process information differently and communicate in a way they understand. We’re not even talking language barriers here.

How We Process Information Differently

The VAK model, Visual, Auditory, and Kinaesthetic, describes three representational systems that reveal how people prefer to learn and communicate.

Originally developed by educational psychologists in the 1920s and further refined in the 1970s, the model suggests that individuals tend to have a dominant modality through which they most naturally take in and process the world. 

It is worth being precise about what this means in practice, because the three modes are more distinct than they first appear.

Visual thinkers process information primarily through sight. They benefit most from diagrams, frameworks, written text, and demonstrations that show how things fit together. In a meeting, they are the ones who want to see the org chart, the timeline, the process map because the spatial relationship between ideas is how meaning becomes real for them. 

Auditory thinkers process primarily through listening and speaking. They respond well to hearing ideas explained, engaging in conversation, and talking through problems out loud. A slide deck with bullet points is not their natural habitat. A discussion that lets them hear multiple perspectives including their own voice in response is where understanding takes root. 

Kinaesthetic thinkers process through doing, feeling, and physical experience. They learn by trying, not by being told. In a training room, they are the ones who quietly disengage during the theory portion and come alive during the exercise. They need to move through an idea, not just see or hear it. A two-hour presentation, however well-constructed, will lose them before the halfway mark.

Where Messages Get Distorted

Understanding these modes helps explain something that frustrates many leaders: the gap between what was communicated and what was understood.

Consider a common scenario. A leadership team wants to roll out a new strategy. They prepare a detailed presentation with forty slides, well-structured, covering context, rationale, implications, and next steps. They deliver it in a town hall. They send the deck afterwards.

The visual thinkers in the room follow the logic clearly and leave with a good grasp of where things are going. The auditory thinkers absorb the key messages but want to talk it through they have questions not because they missed something, but because dialogue is how they confirm understanding. The kinaesthetic thinkers sat through it politely, but the strategy didn’t become real until they were asked to do something with it such as map out their team’s priorities, simulate a decision, work through a case.

The same forty slides produced three different levels of comprehension because of mode.

You can often identify someone’s dominant representational system in how they speak. Visual thinkers say things like “I can see your point” or “let me show you what I mean.” Auditory thinkers say “I hear what you’re saying” or “that doesn’t sound right to me.” Kinaesthetic thinkers say “I feel like we’re missing something” or “I need to get a grip on this.” These are not metaphors. They are windows into how the person is actually processing the conversation. 

What This Means for Facilitation

Most corporate communication which includes presentations, briefings, strategy sessions, training programmes is designed primarily for visual and auditory thinkers.

The deck with talking heads and the Q&As in the end. It is a format that works reasonably well for roughly two thirds of the room and leaves the remaining third doing their best to translate.

Effective facilitation understands these differences and adapts accordingly. A visual learner might need a process map where others need a discussion. An auditory learner might need a structured conversation where others need a demonstration. A kinaesthetic learner might need a physical exercise, a simulation, or a hands-on task to make the same content meaningful. 

This is why the best team experiences are deliberately multi-modal as genuine comprehension requires that every person in the room has at least one moment where the information arrives in a form their system can actually use.

Practically, this means designing for all three modes in any significant communication or facilitation session:

For visual thinkers: frameworks, diagrams, written summaries, clear visual sequencing. Show them the map before you describe the journey.

For auditory thinkers: structured discussion, space for questions, opportunities to articulate their understanding out loud. They need to hear themselves say it before it becomes theirs.

For kinaesthetic thinkers: activities, simulations, physical movement, role play, real scenarios to work through. Give them something to do with the idea, not just something to think about.

The Cost of Getting This Wrong

When communication is designed for only one mode, the consequences are not always visible immediately. The confusion shows during the plan implementation. The misalignment surfaces in the debrief. 

The irony is that most leaders are highly aware of their own preferred mode and naturally design communication that works for people like them. A leader who processes visually will reach for the whiteboard. A leader who processes auditorily will call a meeting and talk it through. Neither is wrong but neither is complete.

The most effective communicators and facilitators are not those who have found the single best mode. They are those who have learned to move fluidly between all three.

In March 2026, Iran announced that the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway through which roughly a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil trade passes, was closed. Seven Malaysian ships were among those stranded, eventually permitted to pass only after diplomatic negotiations between Malaysia and Iran.

The energy headlines dominated but the quieter crisis was in the fertiliser supply. The Arabian Gulf accounts for at least 20 percent of all seaborne fertiliser exports, and the disruptions raised immediate concerns about tightening availability in import-dependent regions, with the potential to drive up global food production costs. The FAO warned that up to 1.5 to 3 million tons of fertiliser trade per month had been delayed, jeopardising agricultural productivity ahead of the planting season.

For Malaysia, a country highly dependent on imports for essential food items including onions, dairy, wheat flour, cooking oil, and beef, bells began to ring. In 2023, food imports rose to approximately USD 18 billion, a ten percent increase from the previous year. A chokepoint on the other side of the world had just made every plate of food in this country a little more expensive and a little less certain. Even the warungs (food stalls) raised their prices overnight.

The question Malaysian corporations should be asking right now is what they were doing about food security before the strait closed and what they intend to do after it reopens. (Truthfully, we’ve lost track of its opening and closings)

The Vulnerability Was Always There

The Hormuz crisis revealed Malaysia’s food security problem. 

According to Malaysia’s Draft National Food Security Blueprint 2030, up to 20 to 50 percent of fruits and vegetables are already lost in the domestic supply chain due to improper packaging, storage, and transport conditions. The average age of Malaysian farmers is above 60. More than 103,000 hectares of agricultural land remain idle, mostly in Selangor and Pahang, due to fragmented land ownership and unresolved inheritance issues. Urban migration continues to pull the next generation away from the fields.

These are structural problems that fertiliser imports from the Gulf cannot solve and that a closed strait merely accelerates.

What urban farming and corporate food security investment offer is not a complete solution. It is a meaningful hedge, a way of building local food resilience into the social fabric of a city before the next crisis makes the absence of it undeniable.

What Corporate Investment in Food Security Actually Looks Like

The Malaysian government has already signalled the direction. Budget 2026 rebranded the existing Tax Incentive for Food Production Projects as the Tax Incentive for Food Security Projects, a signal that the government views this as a national resilience issue, not merely an agricultural one. Companies investing in new food security projects qualify for a 100 percent income tax exemption for ten years, with applications open through 2030. The incentive structure is there. What it needs is corporate partners willing to build alongside it.

There are several ways corporations can show up meaningfully in this space.

Sponsoring urban farm infrastructure in underserved communities for example rooftop gardens, community plots, hydroponic systems in low-cost housing areas puts food production closer to the people who need it most. Urban farming models that produce fresh produce directly in cities reduce dependence on imports, strengthen local supply chains, and make food systems more resilient to global shocks. A company that funds this infrastructure in the neighbourhood where its factory or office sits is investing in the stability of its own operating environment.

Partnering with agri-tech startups working on vertical and precision farming is another avenue. Malaysia’s urban hubs are already seeing growing investment in hydroponics, aeroponics, and vertical farm systems. Corporate partnerships through procurement commitments, co-investment, employee volunteering programmes gives early-stage operators the stability they need to scale.

Finally, companies can invest in food literacy and agricultural education in schools near their operations. The long-term food security problem in Malaysia is partly a pipeline problem, a generation that has moved to cities and lost the knowledge and appetite for growing food. Reversing that requires planting the idea early.

Who Is Already Doing This

The question for Malaysian corporations is not whether this model works. It is whether they intend to be part of it.

Locally, Khazanah Nasional has already pointed the way. In 2023, Khazanah launched the Khazanah Impact Innovation Challenge with the theme “Tackling the Climate Challenge for Malaysia’s Food Security,” offering grants of up to RM500,000 and potential follow-on investments to startups and MSMEs with scalable, measurable solutions in food security and climate resilience. The signal was clear: Malaysia’s largest sovereign wealth fund views food security not as a government problem but as an investable, solvable challenge that requires private sector participation. For other Malaysian corporations, particularly those with large employee bases and community footprints, the same thinking applies.

Internationally, the IKEA Foundation offers a model worth studying. Rather than one-off donations, the Foundation committed USD 3.5 million to a multi-year partnership with the FAO and UNHCR to help 17,000 refugees and host community residents in Kenya and Uganda earn a reliable income through regenerative farming, linking them directly to local food companies that needed a reliable supply base. The programme not only fed people, it connected production to market, built supply chains, and created long-term economic independence. That is the difference between a charitable gesture and a structural investment in food resilience.

Neither of these programmes happened in a single financial year. Both required a decision to commit before the headlines made it obvious.

The Cause Marketing Argument

Beyond the strategic case, there is a brand equity argument that Malaysian corporations should consider carefully.

Food security is a universal concern as it touches every household, every family, every income level. A company that builds a genuine, long-term relationship with food sovereignty in Malaysia is associating its brand with something that is both practically important and emotionally resonant in a way that most CSR causes are not.

The Hormuz crisis gave Malaysians a brief, uncomfortable glimpse of what food insecurity actually feels like. That feeling does not disappear when the strait reopens. Corporations that respond to that moment with something structural for example a community farm, a multi-year partnership with an urban agriculture organisation, or an investment in local food supply chains will build trust that a press release cannot.

The window to lead on this is open. It will not stay open indefinitely.

There is a well-documented principle in behavioural science that most team-building programmes ignore: people act consistently with the identity they hold about themselves, not with the instructions they are given.

Tell someone to collaborate more and they might try harder for a week. Help them see themselves as someone who builds others up, as part of a team that defines itself by how it shares knowledge, and the behaviour tends to follow without the reminder.

Identity does not need enforcement. It is self-sustaining.

This is why “Who are we as a team?” is not a philosophical question. It is a performance question.

The Microsoft Shift

When Satya Nadella became CEO of Microsoft in 2014, the company operated with siloed departments whose employees often waged internal political battles in a highly competitive atmosphere.

This toxic environment resulted in the software behemoth falling behind on key technological innovations like mobile computing, gaming, and social media. 

Microsoft employed some of the most technically capable people in the world so the problem wasn’t in the lack of skills. The problem was identity. The company had a historical “know-it-all” culture and its people behaved exactly as know-it-alls do.

They competed rather than collaborated. They defended rather than explored. They performed in ways that were perfectly consistent with who they believed they were. 

Nadella’s intervention was an identity shift. He called for a transformation from a “know-it-all” fixed mindset culture to a “learn-it-all” growth culture. The new identity was specific, memorable, and behavioural, it told people not just what to value but who to be.

Microsoft’s market value grew from $300 billion in 2014 to over $2.5 trillion by 2023. The technology decisions mattered. But they were made possible by a team that had changed how it saw itself. 

What This Means for Team Building

Most team-building programmes are built around skill acquisition. Communication frameworks. Conflict resolution tools. Decision-making models. These are not without value but they address behaviour at the surface level, what people do rather than at the root level which determines who people believe they are.

Behavioural science consistently shows that identity is a more powerful driver of sustained behaviour than instruction or incentive. When someone acts in a way that is inconsistent with their self-concept, it creates psychological discomfort. When someone acts in a way that confirms who they believe they are, it feels natural, even automatic.

This is why the question “Who are we as a team?” deserves serious time and deliberate design. As a genuine inquiry into the shared identity the team is operating from and whether that identity is producing the behaviour the organisation actually needs.

A team that sees itself as a group of individual performers will optimise for individual performance, even when the task requires collaboration. A team that sees itself as a unit that wins or loses together will share information, cover gaps, and hold each other to account because that is what people like them do.

Three Questions Worth Asking Your Team

Before the next offsite, the next team-building day, or the next leadership development programme, it is worth sitting with these three questions:

How does our team currently describe itself? Not the official values on the wall but the informal story the team tells about who it is. High-performing? Under-resourced? The ones who always deliver? The ones who have seen too many initiatives fail?

Is that identity producing the behaviour we need? Identity is not inherently positive or negative. A team that sees itself as scrappy and resourceful is acting from an identity. So is a team that sees itself as overlooked. The question is whether the current identity is an asset or a constraint.

What identity would make the behaviour we want feel natural? If collaboration is the goal, what does a team that genuinely sees itself as collaborative look like? What does it talk about? How does it celebrate? How does it handle failure? Design backward from the identity, not forward from the skill.

The Work Before the Work

The most effective team experiences do not just build skills. They build the story a team tells about itself. That story and shared identity is what determines how the skills get used when the pressure is on and nobody is watching.

If your next team investment focuses only on what people should do differently, it may produce short-term behaviour change. If it addresses who they believe they are, it produces something more durable: a team that performs like the team it has decided to become.

Last week, there was news about a visibly underweight tiger, pacing slowly in an enclosure in an international zoo outside of Malaysia. Ribs visible. Hip bones prominent. A video clip spread rapidly across Threads and social media, and Malaysians were outraged, demanding answers, signing petitions, calling for animals to be brought home.

The outrage was real and it was right but where was the concern before the video went viral?

The animals were always there. The welfare issues didn’t begin when someone pointed a phone at a cage. The organisations have always been working on their own to rehabilitate, protect, and advocate for wildlife. The sanctuaries, the rescue centres, the conservation NGOs have been doing that work last month, last year, and the year before that. Without headlines. Without petitions. Often without enough funding to do it properly.

This is the cause marketing problem that Malaysian corporations need to sit with.

Reactive Giving Is Not a Strategy

When a story goes viral, corporate donations tend to follow. A wildlife crisis trends on Twitter and suddenly a company’s CSR budget finds an animal welfare component it didn’t have the week before. A petition hits 87,000 signatures and a brand rushes to signal that it cares.

Consumers and employees are increasingly sophisticated about the difference between a company that has built a genuine, long-term relationship with a cause and one that shows up when the cameras do. The former builds trust. The latter, at best, generates a news cycle. At worst, it reads as opportunism, and audiences say so.

What the Wildlife Sector Actually Needs

The conversation about animal welfare in Malaysia is evolving, and it is worth paying attention to where it is going. Public sentiment is shifting, not just toward better conditions within zoos, but toward a broader rethinking of what ethical wildlife support looks like.

Sanctuaries, in-situ conservation programmes, and habitat protection are drawing increasing attention as more meaningful long-term approaches.

Organisations like WWF-Malaysia, the Malaysia Nature Society, and the Borneo Sun Bear Conservation Centre do not operate on viral moments. They operate on consistent, multi-year funding that covers the unglamorous realities of conservation work: veterinary care, keeper salaries, habitat restoration, community engagement.

The daily operations of wildlife sanctuaries include food and medical supplies for rescued animals, as well as materials for forest and coral restoration,  costs that are ongoing.

The Malaysian Palm Oil Green Conservation Foundation has mobilised more than RM40 million in capital to assist NGOs in funding wildlife conservation activities through an ongoing structure of partnerships. That is the model worth studying, regardless of industry. Mpogcf

For corporations thinking about where to put their cause marketing investment, wildlife welfare offers something genuinely valuable. A cause that is emotionally resonant, visually compelling, and connected to questions of national identity and environmental legacy that Malaysians increasingly care about. But it only works as long-term commitment, not crisis response.

Three Ways Corporates Can Show Up Meaningfully

The most effective corporate wildlife partnerships tend to share a few things in common.

They choose specificity over breadth. A company that funds a dedicated programme at one sanctuary for example- keeper training, animal enrichment, veterinary equipment – builds a more credible story than one that scatters small donations across five different causes. Specificity signals genuine interest. It also gives the partner organisation something substantial to work with.

They build in employee engagement. Wildlife conservation lends itself naturally to meaningful team experiences for example habitat restoration days, educational visits, fundraising challenges that connect staff to the cause in a way that a cheque-writing exercise never does.

Organisations like APE Malaysia embed corporate programmes directly within conservation project sites, designing experiences that benefit the environment, wildlife, and local communities simultaneously. This is cause marketing that also does something for the team. APE Malaysia

They commit to time, not just money. A three-year partnership tells a different story than an annual donation. It tells the conservation organisation that they can plan around the support. It tells the public that the company’s interest is structural, not seasonal and it gives the brand a genuine narrative to build over time, one that is earned rather than purchased.

The Shift Already Happening

The public conversation sparked by recent events is not going to disappear quietly. Malaysians are asking harder questions about animal welfare, about the ethics of wildlife in captivity, about what it means for a country rich in biodiversity to take that responsibility seriously.

Corporations that position themselves thoughtfully within that conversation now through genuine, sustained, well-chosen partnerships will be ahead of a shift that is already underway. Those that wait for the next viral video to prompt a donation will always be behind it.

Most leaders know what to do when a problem happens. They’ve read the books, attended the workshops, built the frameworks. What they struggle with is how they show up in the moment and how rarely they notice the gap between the two.

Consider a leader who genuinely values openness. In a calm setting, she asks questions, listens well, invites dissent. But under pressure with a tight deadline loomimg, a disciplinary issue from a managing team member, a bunch of other matters that need her immediate attention, her default setting is to cut problem solving discussions short. Efficiently. What her team experiences is not openness. It is closure dressed in good manners.

This is not her fault. She’s just unaware of her actions.

What Emotional Intelligence Actually Means at the Leadership Level

Emotional intelligence has been packaged and repackaged so many times that the original insight has been almost entirely obscured. It is not about being composed at all times. Composure can be its own form of distance. It is not about being warm or personable or good at remembering birthdays and things people say. Those are nice things, but they are not the point.

At the leadership level, emotional intelligence is the ability to recognise when YOUR internal state is shaping your external impact, in real time, or close to it.

This matters because leaders operate in a continuous stream of signals. Their tone in a Monday meeting sets the emotional register for the week. Their body language during a proposal communicates a verdict before they’ve spoken. Their energy when they are under pressure does not stay internal. It travels. Behavioural science has consistently shown that emotional contagion in group settings is faster and more powerful than most leaders assume  and that it flows downward, from leader to team, with particular force.

The question is not whether you are influencing the emotional environment of your organisation. You definitely are. The question is whether you are doing it with any awareness at all.

A Reflection Practice Worth Trying This Week

Leadership development usually focuses on adding new tools. A new communication model. A new feedback framework. A new way of running meetings. They’re useful but behavioural science also points to something more fundamental: that growth often comes not from acquiring new capabilities but from becoming more aware of what is already happening, internally and externally.

So rather than a new tool, here is a simple reflection to try at the end of any significant meeting or decision this week.

Three questions, no more than five minutes:

What was I feeling in that moment?
Not what you thought, not what you decided but what were you actually feeling? Impatient? Defensive? Certain before the evidence was in? Anxious about how you would be perceived?

How might that have influenced how I responded?

Not to judge the response, but to trace the connection. If you were feeling pressured, did you move faster than the situation required? If you were feeling uncertain, did you defer when you should have led?

What did others likely experience from me?

This is the hardest question, because it requires stepping outside your own internal narrative and imagining what was visible. Not what you intended, but what landed.

What you can do is practice noticing things around you. Noticing is where change actually begins. Notice the moment you catch yourself mid-pattern and think: there it is.

The Harder Work of Leadership

Leadership development has always been easier to sell when it promises new capabilities. New skills are visible, measurable, teachable in a day. Awareness is slower work. It asks leaders to sit with some discomfort: the recognition that the gap between who they intend to be and who their team experiences them to be may be wider than they thought.

But that recognition is the beginning of the kind of growth that actually changes how people lead. Not just what they decide but what others experience when they are deciding.

Malaysia has a stray animal problem. Estimates vary, but the numbers are significant. Hundreds of thousands of cats and dogs living on the streets, with shelters operating at or beyond capacity, dependent almost entirely on public donations and volunteer work to keep functioning.

And yet some of Malaysia’s most commercially successful pet brands have found a way to turn the everyday act of buying pet food into something that directly addresses this problem through the architecture of how they operate.

Pet Lovers Centre and the power of permanent infrastructure
Pet Lovers Centre Malaysia has been running its Annual Pet Food Drive for several years, partnering with shelters including PAWS Animal Welfare Society, Save a Stray Animal Malaysia, and Cat Beach Sanctuary to collect donations of pet food across its retail network. What makes PLC’s approach particularly instructive is  the permanent adoption centre it has maintained inside its SS2 outlet since 2014. 

That single decision to allocate 125 square feet of commercial retail space permanently to animal adoption changes the nature of the relationship between the brand and its cause. It is no longer a campaign. It is infrastructure. Every customer who walks into that store is walking into a space where the brand’s values are physically present, not just printed on packaging or posted on social media.

The result is a cause marketing model that doesn’t require a special occasion to activate. It runs continuously, quietly, and credibly, building trust with every visit.

An interesting footnote on product innovation
In 2022, Pet World Malaysia announced a partnership with SPCA Selangor and Nutrition Technologies to develop dog food formulated from Black Soldier Fly Larvae protein, with the resulting kibbles donated to animal rescue centres.

Whether or not the programme has scaled since the announcement, the intent behind it is worth noting, a brand building shelter needs directly into its research and development process rather than treating welfare as a separate CSR activity. The cause becomes part of the product’s origin story, which changes everything about how authentically a brand can communicate its values.

What other Malaysian brands can learn from this

The pet industry’s approach to animal welfare cause marketing works because the alignment is obvious. A pet food brand supporting animal shelters makes immediate sense to every customer. There is no gap to explain, no complicated logic to follow. You buy the food, the shelter benefits. Simple.

Most industries have an equivalent alignment waiting to be found. A cleaning product brand whose sales support communities affected by water insecurity. A stationery company whose purchases fund literacy programmes. A food brand whose supply chain decisions support smallholder farmers. The question is never whether a cause connection exists, it is whether the brand is willing to build its operations around it rather than just gesturing towards it through annual campaigns.

The brands that get this right don’t treat cause marketing as a communications strategy. They treat it as a business decision, one that happens to generate extraordinary loyalty, word-of-mouth, and trust in the process.

The starting point

If you are a Malaysian brand trying to find your equivalent of the pet food drive or the adoption centre, the right question is not “what cause should we support?” It is “what problem exists in the world that our business is already positioned to address and are we willing to build something permanent around it?”

The answer to that question is worth more than any campaign.

A study published in April 2026 by researchers at the University of Toronto found something that most leaders already sense but rarely act on: on days when people feel mentally sharp, they set higher goals and complete significantly more work, roughly 40 extra minutes of productive output compared to their low-energy days.

Forty minutes. Every day. Depending on which version of yourself shows up.

The myth of the consistent performer

We build teams around the assumption of consistency. Targets are set, deadlines are fixed, and the expectation, usually unspoken, is that people will show up at roughly the same level every day. When they don’t, we call it a performance issue. We schedule more meetings. We add more oversight.

Organisations that keep pushing for consistent output without accounting for natural fluctuation in human energy will always find themselves frustrated by the gap between what their teams are capable of and what they actually deliver. The design of how work gets done matters as much as the expectations placed on it.

Sleep, stress, hydration, personal circumstances, accumulated pressure, all of it moves the needle on performance, day by day, sometimes hour by hour. People are not machines, and their output reflects that reality whether we acknowledge it or not. The leader who understands this shifts their focus from managing outcomes alone to managing the conditions that make good outcomes possible.

What happens when we ignore it

Here is the part that should concern every leader: employees who push through low-energy days without adjustment are not just less productive. They are more likely to make significant errors, the kind that cost time, money, relationships, and trust.

A sluggish mind forced through high-stakes cognitive work- a strategic decision, a sensitive client conversation, a complex analysis – is operating at a deficit it cannot always detect. The person sitting at the desk often doesn’t know they’re impaired. They think they’re just a bit tired, and their judgement doesn’t flag its own deterioration.

This is where the real risk lives. Not in the tasks that don’t get done on low-energy days, but in the tasks that do.

What you can actually do about it

The solution is not to give everyone unlimited rest days or to lower expectations. It is to design smarter.

The first and simplest thing a leader can do is normalise the conversation. Allow people to say “I’m not at my best today” without it being read as an excuse. That single shift in culture changes what people do with the information. Instead of pushing through a high-stakes task at 40% capacity, they reschedule it. Instead of sending a client proposal they haven’t properly reviewed, they get a colleague to run through it with them or if there is time, they sleep on it.

The second thing is to encourage task-switching on low-energy days rather than task-abandonment. There is almost always productive work that doesn’t require peak cognition – reconnecting with contacts, responding to emails that have been sitting too long, tidying systems, filing, organising. Administrative tasks that create real value without demanding full mental horsepower.

I do this myself. On days when I feel sluggish and know I cannot do my best strategic thinking, I stop forcing it. Instead I reach out to former clients, contacts I haven’t spoken to in a while, connections that deserve a follow-up. It keeps me moving without burning through cognitive resources I don’t have, and more often than not, something useful comes from it.

The third thing is to build recovery into the design of your team’s work. Pacing, breaks, and reflection are not indulgences. They are the mechanism by which peak performance becomes repeatable. A team that never rests is a team that is slowly, invisibly degrading.

The leadership reframe

Managing a team’s energy is not softer than managing their output, it is more sophisticated. It requires a leader to hold two things at once: the reality of deadlines and deliverables, and the reality that the people responsible for those deliverables are biological beings with natural rhythms.

The best leaders don’t demand consistency. They create conditions in which consistency becomes more likely by understanding what depletes their people, building in room to recover, and giving everyone permission to work with their energy rather than against it.

Your team is not underperforming. They are just human. The question is whether your organisation knows how to respond to that.