Leaders usually come to me when something is off. Some know it. Most feel it. Sometimes they want a new direction, sometimes they can’t yet name one, and sometimes they don’t know they want one at all. But the feeling is there, and it’s usually been there for a while.
Every inflection point is different. Different organization, different leader, different market, different shape. But underneath, the signature is the same. What worked before isn’t working anymore. Something has to change. And the person standing inside it can’t see what and can’t see why.
This blindness is not a shortage of effort or intellect. These are incredibly capable people running companies they built. But the place they’re seeing from limits what they’re able to see. And no one can see that place.
So they reach for what they can see. What always worked comes first. When that fails, the obvious fixes. A key hire. A new strategy. The framework everyone’s reading about that quarter. But every solution comes from the same place the problem came from. So the problem stays.
The word inflection point comes from calculus. It’s where a curve changes how it bends. The line can still be rising, but the change has already begun.
Which explains something I’ve watched for years: leaders feel it before evidence exists. The numbers haven’t turned. The board is happy. Yet still, the restlessness. The frustration. The sense that more is possible. The exhaustion that doesn’t match the workload. Force where there used to be flow.
The evidence comes later. The feeling comes first.
Most leaders treat that feeling as a shortcoming, something to push through. I did too. I stood at an inflection point of my own, at the height of a business I’d spent over a decade building. I kept reaching for harder, because harder had never once failed me before.
So I’ve come to read the feeling the other way. It’s information, and it’s the earliest information there is. It arrives before the data, before the diagnosis, before the language. It’s not saying something is wrong with you. It’s saying you’ve outgrown the current way, and the current way is starting to cost you.
I’ve also watched what happens when the feeling gets pushed through instead of answered. Nothing crashes. And that’s what makes it dangerous. The leader stays where they are, working harder for less.
Change still comes eventually. It just comes harder, later, and more expensive. Paid for in exhaustion and sometimes burnout. The cost of an unanswered inflection point isn’t catastrophe. It’s staying.
Organizations stand at inflection points too, and so do entire markets. The same signature at every scale. But the turn never happens at scale. It happens inside people, one at a time.
That turn is the work I’m inside of every day, and it never begins with more effort. It begins with finding a new place to see from.
The feeling isn’t a shortcoming. It’s the summons.