In Los Angeles, the turn from winter to spring is easy to miss. No dramatic shift in the trees, no morning frost giving way to something softer. But every year, right around this time, the jasmine comes. You smell it before you see it, and suddenly you know: the season has changed.

As we collectively cross into this new season, I find myself in a transitional one of my own. As I have been, in one way or another, for the last nine months.

This is my last Wednesday Words before parental leave, and it feels like the right moment to make sense of where we've been; not to close anything, but to name the thread before I hand it to others to keep pulling.

Over the past several months, we've been building a case. We started with what discontinuity actually is — not change, not disruption, but a break in causal logic, where past expertise stops being a compass and becomes a constraint. We named the three traps that catch the most capable leaders: the expertise trap, the predictability illusion, and the individual heroism fallacy. And most recently, we turned toward what the response actually requires: not sharper individual thinking, but a fundamentally different kind of collective intelligence.

What we haven't fully named yet is what it takes to actually get there.

What pregnancy has taught me about discontinuity

My default relationship to challenge has always been to push. Run a little farther. Say yes when I'm depleted. Treat more as the right answer. For most of my life, that served me. And then, rather abruptly, it didn't. Pregnancy has been an extended lesson in discovering that slowing down isn't the opposite of progress; it's what makes space for something new to arrive.

I think this is true for leaders in discontinuity, too.

The instinct when the environment gets uncertain is to accelerate — more analysis, more processes, more effort applied to the same approaches. But the assumptions that are limiting you don't yield to pressure. They yield to something quieter: a willingness to stop outrunning them long enough to actually see them.

This happened to me last year, in a small but clarifying way. I had convinced myself that strategic thinking required being at my desk; fingers on the keyboard, visibly working, logging the hours. So I sat there, waiting for clarity that never came. Out of exasperation one morning, I gave myself permission to go for a hike instead. No agenda, just a notepad and genuinely low expectations. Halfway up the hill, I had to sit down. Not from fatigue, but from the rush of ideas.

A simple assumption, but one I hadn't even known I was holding. It took a peer consultancy session to surface it, someone else creating the friction I couldn't generate for myself.

This is what we're calling strategic disorientation. Not disorientation for its own sake, but deliberately creating the conditions where old certainties surface, where the familiar playbook meets friction, and where new hypotheses can begin to form. The work isn't defending what you already know. It's getting honest about which assumptions are no longer earning their place.

A few questions worth sitting with, wherever you are right now:

• When you make a decision under pressure, are you drawing on what's worked before or staying genuinely curious about whether this moment is different?

• Is the expertise (yours and others) in the room helping you see more clearly, or narrowing what feels possible?

• Where are you pushing harder when the moment might actually be asking you to slow down?

Temporary Farewell

I'll be out from May 8 through the end of August. Victor, Erin, Amelia, and Ryan will continue to share our evolving thinking on discontinuity and what we're learning in the room with our partners as we help them navigate it.

Wishing you a beautiful summer. May it bring at least one moment that gently rearranges what you thought you knew.

Sara