29. The View from Great Hill
Tuesday, 04 August 2026
Most organisations do not have a strategy problem.
They have a visibility problem.
They know roughly where they want to go. The difficulty is that they cannot see the ground between here and there. Objectives multiply. Dashboards expand. Meetings become longer. Reports become thicker. New initiatives arrive before old initiatives have departed. Activity increases. Momentum increases. Effort increases. Yet strangely, confidence declines. People work harder whilst becoming less certain that they are working on the right things.
The irony is that organisations rarely become confused because they lack information. More often, they become confused because they possess too much of it. Every metric appears important. Every opportunity appears worthy of consideration. Every project acquires strategic significance. Leaders find themselves surrounded by data and yet increasingly uncertain about what matters most.
On a clear, sunny day, I would not be writing this from my kitchen.
A few weeks ago I could have laced up my boots, left the house and walked to Great Hill before breakfast. On a particularly energetic morning I might even have run it. It is one of the places I go to think. A familiar route. A familiar climb. A familiar view. For the next few months, however, Great Hill will remain out of reach. A recent accident has confined me much closer to home than I would like, and so I find myself looking towards the hill rather than from it.
Strangely, distance has sharpened the lesson.
On most clear days, Great Hill offers views of the Lake District and Snowdonia. On particularly clear days, Anglesey appears on the horizon. Occasionally the Isle of Man emerges from the haze. Local enthusiasts insist that on exceptionally rare days Belfast can be seen, although I have never been fortunate enough to witness it myself.
The point is not what can be seen.
The point is what happens when visibility improves.
The clearer the day, the further you can see. More importantly, the clearer the day, the easier it becomes to understand the ground between here and there. Distances become easier to judge. Landmarks emerge. Routes that once appeared uncertain suddenly become obvious. What previously looked like a collection of choices gradually reveals itself as a path.
The destination feels more real because the path becomes more visible.
One of the landmarks visible from Great Hill on a clear day is Pen-y-Ghent. Over the years it has become a familiar sight. I have climbed it, run up it and cycled around it as part of a two-hundred-mile training ride through the Yorkshire Dales. What always strikes me is how different the same landscape appears depending on where you stand. From Great Hill, Pen-y-Ghent looks like a clear destination on the horizon. From Pen-y-Ghent, Great Hill becomes part of the horizon in return. In both cases, the route appears surprisingly straightforward.
Yet anyone who has travelled between the two knows better.
The straight line exists only in the view.
Between those two points lie valleys, roads, rivers, walls, weather systems, wrong turns and countless small decisions. Viewed from a distance, the journey appears obvious. Experienced on the ground, it is anything but. The destination may be visible, but the journey still has to be made.
Perhaps this explains why strategic plans often look so convincing. Looking backwards, every successful journey appears to follow a straight line. Looking forwards, it rarely feels that way.
The straight line exists only in the view.
Leadership literature tends to assume organisations suffer from a shortage of strategy. I am increasingly convinced the opposite is true. Most organisations possess more strategy than they know what to do with. What they lack is visibility. They cannot see the ground between today and tomorrow.
One of the stranger assumptions in management is that maturity should produce complexity. We expect successful organisations to have more objectives, more reports, more committees and more measures. Yet the organisations I admire most usually possess fewer.
Clarity removes things.
Confusion adds them.
Over the last few years, Twelve Scholars Institute has undergone precisely this process. The destination has remained remarkably consistent. We exist to make Excellence the standard. The belief that leadership matters has not changed. The conviction that standards matter has not changed.
What has changed is visibility.
The clearer the view became, the simpler the plan became.
Most leaders believe they need better answers. More often, they need fewer questions. The moment the fog lifts, dozens of decisions disappear. Not because they were solved. Because they were never important in the first place.
Leadership is often described as the ability to make decisions. I suspect the more valuable skill is deciding what can safely be ignored. Most organisations drown beneath priorities. The word itself has become almost meaningless. If everything is important, nothing is.
Earlier this year I found myself staring at a planning document for the Institute. It contained objectives, measures, milestones, timelines and projections. It looked impressively professional. It also obscured the truth.
The clearer the view became, the fewer things mattered.
Eventually the fog lifted sufficiently for five things to emerge.
They were not projects.
They were not initiatives.
They were not departments.
They were more fundamental than that.
Authority.
Fellowship.
Standard.
Custodians.
Endurance.
Five objectives.
Five measures.
Five years.
The simplicity was almost unsettling.
How hard could it be?
Quite hard, as it turns out. Not because the work is complicated. Most worthwhile things are surprisingly straightforward. The difficulty lies in resisting the temptation to complicate them.
Then the view became clearer still.
Five objectives became one immediate objective.
Five measures became one immediate measure.
The number was twelve.
More specifically, twelve scholars committed to begin the Fellowship by September 2027.
If you had asked me two years ago what success looked like, I might have given you a revenue figure.
Today I would give you a different answer.
Twelve.
The abstraction suddenly became tangible: twelve names, twelve conversations, twelve commitments and, ultimately, twelve chairs around a table. Twelve people choosing to raise the standard.
Everything else is terrain.
Revenue is terrain.
Faculty are terrain.
Publications are terrain.
Partnerships are terrain.
The route is visible.
The destination is visible.
The immediate milestone is visible.
Everything else is terrain.
For the next fifteen months, the constraint is twelve.
Not 12 thousand subscribers.
Not 12 million likes.
Not 12 desks in a shiny office.
Just twelve exceptional people willing to commit themselves to a standard and a journey that will take years to complete.
Most organisations try to move faster by increasing effort. More meetings. More projects. More urgency. More pressure. Yet anyone who has crossed open moorland in thick fog understands the flaw in that logic.
The problem is not effort.
The problem is visibility.
The clearer the route becomes, the faster progress feels.
The mission remains the same.
The horizon remains the same.
The difference is that the ground between here and there is finally visible.
That, perhaps, is the real value of clarity.
Not that it allows you to see further.
That it allows you to move faster.
In twelve weeks' time, I hope to be standing on Great Hill again. The view will be unchanged. The Lake District will still sit to the north. Snowdonia will still rise to the west. Pen-y-Ghent will still mark the horizon.
The destination was never the problem.
The route was.
Fortunately, the route is becoming clearer.
Twelve scholars.
September 2027.
Everything else is terrain.