Pete Behrens | Leadership Insights

Leading Through Uncertainty: What Government Leaders Need to Hear Right Now

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 22:40:49 GMT

Why Government Leaders Are Operating in Terrain They Weren't Trained For

Uncertainty isn't a temporary condition to push through — it's the permanent terrain of leadership today, and the tools most government leaders were trained on weren't built for it. The leaders who navigate it best aren't the ones who project the most confidence, but the ones willing to name what they don't know, invite others into the problem, and build the trust that makes authority mean something.

That's the argument Pete Behrens, leadership coach, speaker, and author of Into the Fog , makes in a recent conversation with Michael Keegan on the Business of Government podcast — a discussion with particular relevance for government executives navigating rapid change, public scrutiny, and competing demands.

Listen to the full interview here .

The Leadership Challenge Has Changed

Most leadership thinking prepares people for two conditions: clear skies, where you plan and optimize, and stormy weather, where you act decisively in crisis. Pete argues there's a third terrain — the fog — that most leaders are neither trained for nor paying enough attention to.

"It's not dramatic. It doesn't announce itself. Markets shift, team dynamics change. Things that worked last quarter stop working and you can't explain why."

And yet the natural response — in leaders trained for the other two terrains — is to treat it like one of them. The instinct is to reach for familiar tools — control, certainty, speed. In the fog, those tools make things worse. What's required is slowing down, sensing what's happening, and making decisions without waiting for clarity that isn't coming. For government leaders operating under public accountability and short appointment cycles, that's a harder discipline than it sounds.

The External Fog Is the Easy One

Most leaders are willing to examine the external fog — policy changes, geopolitical instability, stakeholder conflicts. The harder conversation is the one about what's happening on the inside.

Pete describes it as a car window steaming up from the inside on a rainy day. You can't see out — and you may not realize that's what's happening.

In high-accountability environments, leaders who perform confidence rather than build trust tend to create organizations that tell them what they want to hear — the feedback loop they can least afford.

On Authority, Trust, and Leading When Everyone Is Watching

The tension between leading with authority and leading with trust is one government leaders feel constantly. Pete draws a distinction that most leadership conversations skip over: authority is positional — the title, the rank, the formal power. Trust is relational. In complex, high-scrutiny environments, trust is what determines whether authority actually works.

"The best referees know that the relationship I build with the players allows me, when I blow that whistle, for them to trust it and respect it. If I just start blowing that whistle without that relationship, I'm a terrible referee."

In stakeholder-dense environments, positional authority erodes quickly without the trust to back it. The leaders who build trust first find that when they do need their authority, it lands differently.

Uncertainty Doesn't Create the Leader. It Reveals One.

Late in the interview, Pete makes a distinction worth sitting with.

"Uncertainty doesn't create the leader. It reveals the leader."

For government executives operating under scrutiny, short appointment cycles, and the weight of public accountability, that reframes the environment — not as something happening to them, but as something showing them who they are as leaders, and whether the foundation they've built is one that holds.

Leading Amid Uncertainty and Change: Tech Leader Summit

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 19:14:04 GMT

Stop Chasing Answers! Leading Amid Uncertainty and Change

In this keynote at the 2025 Tech Leader Summit in Clearwater, Florida, Pete challenges the expert mindset that drives so many technical leaders—the belief that every problem has a solution in the back of the book.

Through vulnerable storytelling and live demonstrations, he reveals why the Fog—that space where uncertainty meets rapid change—isn't a crisis to avoid but the frontier where impactful leadership begins.

From Math to the Fog

Pete opens with a confession: a kindergarten note sent home to his mother describing five-year-old Peter as "quite a discipline problem lately—challenging authority by doing what he wants."

Some might call that insubordination. Pete prefers "early experiments in leadership."

He struggled with subjective subjects—English, spelling, too many exceptions. Then he discovered math. Beautiful, clean, predictable. Rules and logic with answers that were clearly right or wrong. Half the answers printed right there in the back of the textbook.

Math led to science. Science led to programming. More rules, more logic, more problems with solutions. He could lose himself for months working on complex system design challenges. When it finally clicked, when all the pieces came together—pure magic.

But entering the workforce brought problems that didn't have answers in the back of the book. Problems that couldn't be solved with logic alone. Just opinions, differences, endless shades of gray.

He calls this feeling the Fog.

The Outcome Is People

Pete shares the story of Mark—a new engineer fresh out of college who Pete was assigned to mentor. Pete didn't ask for Mark. Didn't need Mark. And if he's being honest, didn't want Mark.

So he did what many first-time leaders do: assigned Mark a safe, isolated side project. Something non-critical that wouldn't interfere with Pete's work.

When it came time to merge Mark's code, it was a mess. Sloppy, poorly designed. Pete threw it out and reworked it himself, with Mark sitting beside him in the passenger seat.

At the time, Pete believed Mark had failed. Today he knows: Mark wasn't the problem. Pete was.

"Mark wasn't in the way of my work. Mark WAS my work. Leadership doesn't use people to achieve outcomes—it understands that people are the true outcome."

Managing Tension, Not Solving Problems

To demonstrate what leadership actually feels like, Pete brings volunteers on stage with an exercise band. Two people pulling in opposite directions—expertise opposing the openness needed to develop others, authority opposing the respect that must be earned.

Both sides matter. Both are essential. Pull too hard on one side and the other strains. You can't let go or everything falls apart.

"This is what leadership feels like. Uncomfortable. Tiring. That's leadership."

Then he adds two more volunteers, all four pulling the band in different directions. Competing priorities. Multiple stakeholders. Different directions. All pulling at the same time.

"This might look like chaos. But it's not. This is leadership. This is what we signed up for."

The lesson: leadership isn't about picking the right side. It's about learning to live in the tension between sides—to hold it, to manage it, without letting it tear you apart.

Changing the Game: From Ping Pong to Poker

Pete introduces Amy, an IT leader who felt like "I'm in a game of ping pong, only I'm not playing the game—I'm the ball."

Every stakeholder had their pet project. Every project was labeled top priority. Amy was getting whacked back and forth between them.

Pete asked: "If you could change the game, what would it look like?"

Amy's answer: "I wish the stakeholders would play each other, not me."

So Amy created what she privately called Battlezoid. She invited all stakeholders to one table, laid out her team's limited capacity for everyone to see, and gave each stakeholder poker chips.

The rules: if you want your work prioritized, show up and play. Make your case to your peers, not to Amy one-on-one. Get them to invest in your priority. Don't show up? Your chips go into the pot for others to use.

The tension didn't disappear. But it got shared. Amy made it visible so everyone could see it, feel it, and manage it together.

What Amy discovered: "In leadership, HOW a decision gets made is often as, or more, important than WHAT that decision is."

(To learn more about Amy's story, read an excerpt from Pete's book Into the Fog .)

The Organizational EKG

Pete closes with his own health scare—an irregular heartbeat discovered during a routine checkup. From the outside, he looked fine. Felt fit. But inside, his heart wasn't keeping rhythm.

He draws the parallel to organizational health. At a leadership retreat, he shows them their organization's EKG based on survey data. Between control and create, they're out of sync. Between compete and collaborate, leaders and employees are feeling completely different things.

The typical response: align on a strategy, shape the message, roll it out.

Pete challenges this: "What if the answer isn't a new strategy, but a new approach to developing a strategy?"

For him, getting back in rhythm meant surgery. Nine months of recovery. A step back to enable more steps forward.

For them, it meant taking their foot off the gas. Bringing the problem to their people instead of bringing another solution.

Eighteen months later, another scan. The lines weren't perfect, but the spikes and valleys that used to clash were starting to sync.

"In the Fog, speed compounds errors. Clarity is what matters most. Sometimes the boldest choice is pausing to pivot."

Three Questions

Pete leaves the audience with three questions—not to solve, but to name:

What's one door you need to open? Find the "Mark" in your life who could be more centered in your work.
What's one tension you need to ease? Name the Fog you're absorbing that could be shared with others.
What's one step back you need to take? Identify the part of your life that would benefit from pausing to pivot.

His final confession: "I still struggle with all of this. Every single day. I haven't mastered leadership—but I have learned how to do it better. The difference now? I notice it faster. I recover quicker. I ask for help sooner."

Keynote delivered at Tech Leader Summit 2025, Clearwater, Florida

Talent Forge Podcast: Leadership Isn’t a Promotion—It’s a Practice

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 19:30:42 GMT

What happens when your best engineer becomes your worst manager?

It’s more common than we’d like to admit.

On The Talent Forge Podcast's episode " What if Leadership is Just Navigating Through Fog? with Pete Behrens ", host Jay Johnson and Pete dug into a pattern that shows up across nearly every technical organization: we promote high-performing individual contributors into leadership roles… and then expect them to figure it out.

No training. No transition. Just a new title—and a completely different job.

The result? Many new managers struggle within the first couple of years. It’s not because they lack intelligence or drive; it’s because leadership isn’t an extension of technical expertise—it’s a fundamentally different discipline.

The Shift: From Authority to Influence

In the episode, Jay and Pete explore the critical distinction between leadership (the act) and the leader (the title). They discuss why influence—not authority—is the real predictor of success.

Leadership isn’t something you earn once you’re promoted. It’s something you practice every day, from any seat. They got tactical on what that looks like before you even have the role:

Guiding decisions without needing to own them.
Facilitating conversations that actually lead to outcomes.
Creating alignment across diverging perspectives.
Bringing quieter voices into the room to solve harder problems.

These small, often overlooked behaviors are the true proving ground for future leaders.

Navigating Your "Inner Fog"

The conversation closed with a deep dive into the core metaphor of Pete's book, Into the Fog .

Leadership, at its core, is stepping into uncertainty—moving forward when you don’t have all the answers. But as Pete shared with Jay, the hardest fog isn’t always external market shifts or organizational change. Often, it’s internal.

It’s the fog of ego, the haze of blind spots, and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are (or aren’t) as leaders. To move forward, we have to learn to "wipe the steam off the inside of the glass" before we can see the road ahead.

Watch the full interview

Peak Leadership: The Hidden Art of Leading Well

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 22:18:36 GMT

When Great Leadership Disappears

In a recent episode of Relearning Leadership , Pete Behrens shares a story from a helicopter ski trip in the Canadian Rockies that reveals something most leaders never consider: when leadership is truly working, you barely notice it's there. It shows up not as authority or control, but as a team that feels clear, confident, and capable.

The Tension Every Leader Faces

Pete unpacks the dynamic every leader navigates — the balance between exercising authority and respect. Too much control and you stifle the people around you. Too little and they feel unsure and unsteady. The best leaders don't find a fixed point between these two; they learn to read each situation and adjust in real time.

A Practice, Not a Destination

What looks effortless from the outside is the result of deep awareness and continuous practice. Moment by moment. Conversation by conversation. This episode is a reminder that peak leadership isn't reserved for a few — it's available to anyone willing to pay attention.

Leading Without Authority: Insights from the Agile Mentors Podcast

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 23:13:38 GMT

The Frozen Middle Holds the Key

In this Agile Mentors Podcast conversation with Brian Milner, Pete addresses a frustration he hears constantly from leaders: "I wish my manager could hear this."

Middle managers often describe themselves as stuck between a rock and a hard place—pressure from above, resistance from below, caught in what's commonly called the "frozen middle." But Pete reframes this entirely: "You're the only one in the organization who feels the pain but has access to the top layer for change."

When it comes to organizational transformation, more change happens from the middle than from the top.

Authority Versus Respect

The conversation explores a critical distinction: there are two types of influence in organizations. Authority comes from a title. Respect comes from competency—the combination of education and experience that makes others willing to follow your lead.

The trap? Leaders who receive titles before developing competency depend on authority to influence. Those who develop capability first—earning respect through expertise—become far more effective leaders.

As Pete explains: "We manage things like projects, programs, and technology. We lead people." The difference matters.

From Solo to Chorus

Individual change agents face an uphill battle. Pete shares the story of a leader who spent two years at a new company trying to bring about change as a single voice. Everyone looked at him like he was crazy. Then he hired one person who'd been through the same leadership development. Two voices became a duet. Conversations multiplied. Eventually, dominoes started falling.

The lesson? "Everybody can be a catalyst. Everybody can influence. But you can't do it alone. Activate one other voice. That's enough to start."

Managing Tension, Not Solving Problems

Throughout the discussion, Pete returns to a concept that shifts how leaders think about their work: many organizational challenges aren't problems to solve—they're tensions to manage.

Tech debt versus features. Strategy versus tactics. Empowerment versus alignment. Speed versus quality. These tensions never disappear. Leaders who chase answers to these questions miss the point. The work is learning to manage the tension itself.

One product owner Pete coached felt like a ball getting whacked around by stakeholders. The solution wasn't finding the "right" answer. It was bringing stakeholders together to fight each other for prioritization—changing her role from ball to facilitator of the court.

Leading Cultural Transformation at a Century-Old Insurer

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 22:46:54 GMT

The Rarest Kind of Transformation

At the Business Agility Institute Conference in New York, Pete co-presented with Amjed Al-Zoubi, CIO of Amerisure, on something rarely seen: an organization that chose to transform before crisis forced them to.

Most cultural transformations begin with a burning platform - declining revenue, competitive threats, or survival pressure. Amerisure's story was different. This commercial insurance provider with over 100 years of history looked at culture assessment data, saw the gap between their control-oriented present and the innovative future they needed, and made a choice.

What Actually Drives Cultural Change

The presentation revealed a critical insight often missed in transformation stories: only half the battle requires changing the existing culture. The other half is changing people's belief about what the culture needs to be.

Over three years working with Pete, Amerisure's leadership team focused on three areas simultaneously - business agility through project experiments, leadership agility through mindset shifts, and everyday agility through decisions and ceremonies. They formed cross-functional teams, ran controlled experiments, and measured progress through culture surveys showing gradual movement toward their desired state.

Results included 30% reduction in time-to-market, nearly halved lead times, and multiple industry innovation awards. But Pete and Amjed didn't shy away from the harder truths: stress still triggers old habits, uncertainty remains uncomfortable, and the journey never actually ends.

The Winning Ingredients

Eight factors made the difference: defining business goals rather than "agility" as the goal, executive education and genuine engagement, culture awareness through data, whole-business involvement crossing traditional silos, a committed senior council driving the journey, sustained attention with yearly re-intention, internal self-direction rather than consultant dependence, and an experimental mindset that builds on success while pivoting on failure.

Watch the complete case study presentation

Co-presented with Amjed Al-Zoubi, CIO of Amerisure, at the 2022 Business Agility Conference, New York

Stop Chasing Answers: Managing Tensions at FedAgile 2025

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 21:28:35 GMT

When Problems Don't Have Solutions

At the Federal Reserve's FedAgile 2025 conference, Pete delivered a keynote that challenged conventional thinking: some of the most critical problems leaders face can't actually be solved—they can only be managed.

The session, "Stop Chasing Answers: 5 Problems You Can't Solve," received an overall rating of 4.8 out of 5, with 85% of attendees giving it a perfect score. What resonated most? The concept that organizational tensions require balance rather than elimination.

The Dishwasher Principle

Pete used an everyday example to illustrate competing "right" answers. In his household, he and his wife Jana had different approaches to loading the dishwasher. For years, Pete saw his way—maximizing dishes and cleanliness—as correct. Jana's approach? Optimize for speed.

"Jana isn't wrong," Pete explained. "She just has a different right."

This seemingly simple insight revealed a profound leadership principle: real leadership isn't about knowing THE right way. It's about managing the tension between competing right ways that both have merit.

Agility as a Dial, Not a Switch

Rather than treating agility as an all-or-nothing proposition, Pete introduced the concept of agility as a dial to be adjusted based on context. The audience particularly connected with his reframing of the Agile Manifesto—replacing "over" with "and" to emphasize balance rather than choosing one value at the expense of another.

Using a rubber band demonstration with volunteers, Pete showed how leaders face multiple tensions simultaneously—tactical versus strategic, speed versus quality, innovation versus stability—all pulling in different directions at once.

"This is where real leadership lives," Pete told the audience. "Right in this uncomfortable, in-between space. You can't solve it, but you can manage it."

Creating Your Own Agile Recipe

For Federal Reserve attendees navigating cross-functional collaboration challenges and strategic execution, Pete's message landed: stop waiting for the perfect process and create your own approach. Treat frameworks as playbooks, not rigid recipes.

The session addressed what matters most to leaders in the fog: not finding the right decision, but creating the right conditions for better decisions to be made.

A Recipe for Leading in the Fog

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 19:04:51 GMT

The Problem With Recipes

As Guest Editor for the Business Agility Institute's Emergence February 2023 "Leading Through the Fog" edition, Pete writes a provocative essay challenging how leaders approach uncertainty. The piece, titled "Food for Thought: A Recipe for Leading in the Fog," examines why business leaders cling to outdated recipes for success—and why those recipes keep failing.

From In Search of Excellence to The Halo Effect

Pete traces the history of business recipe books—from Tom Peters and Robert Waterman's In Search of Excellence (1982) to Jim Collins' Built to Last (1994)—and reveals their fatal flaw. When McKinsey analyzed these "excellent" companies a decade later, 20% no longer existed, 46% were struggling, and only 33% remained high performers.

The problem? Researchers built recipes by analyzing companies at their peak, suffering from what Phil Rosenzweigh calls "The Halo Effect"—connecting winning dots while ignoring losing ones, confusing correlation with causality, and creating selective data at best.

A New Recipe for Today

So what's the recipe for leading through today's fog? Pete synthesizes insights from Bill Joiner ( Leadership Agility ), Adam Grant ( Think Again ), and Brené Brown ( Dare to Lead ) to arrive at a simple conclusion: inspect and adapt.

The new recipe includes five steps: Lead yourself first, set and track goals, focus on doing a few things well, inspect and adapt through curiosity and experimentation, and celebrate progress with the people who helped you get there.

Ingredients : Education, experimentation, data, and coaching.

Serves : One, but best shared with others.

As Pete notes: "I wish I had a clear, easy-to-follow recipe for you. Instead, the recipe I have in mind will be hard to follow, and it may lead to some failure. In fact, I am sure it will lead you to failure. But that's the point. We learn best through failure."

Originally published in Emergence: The Journal of Business Agility, February 2023. Pete Behrens served as Guest Editor for the "Leading Through the Fog" edition.

Want to read more of the articles Pete curated for the "Leading through the Fog" edition of Emergence?

View More Articles

4 Things CEOs Must Do Differently to Lead With Clarity and Purpose

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 23:38:27 GMT

When the Fog Rolls In

One day, your team is humming and direction feels solid. The next, the fog rolls in—priorities shift, people disengage, and confidence evaporates. We blame market volatility or technology disruption, but often the fog isn't just around us. It's within us.

In a feature for Inc. Magazine by Marcel Schwantes, Pete was interviewed about human-centered leadership and his book Into the Fog: Leadership Stories From the Edge of Uncertainty . The article, "4 Things CEOs Must Do Differently to Lead With Clarity and Purpose," explores why the future belongs to leaders who lead like humans first and executives second.

Four Essential Skills

"Fog is the uncertainty, ambiguity, and complexity that surround us," Pete explains. "But it's also the internal confusion and doubt within us. Recognizing that duality is where real leadership begins."

The article highlights four essential skills Pete discusses: leading from humanity rather than hierarchy, building trust before strategy, embracing vulnerability as strength, and choosing courage over control.

After more than two decades helping leaders navigate external chaos and internal struggle, Pete's key takeaway is clear: Human-centered leadership doesn't fight the fog—it works with it.

Read the full article at Inc. Magazine .

Originally published in Inc. Magazine, November 18, 2025.

Into the Fog: The Book Pete Behrens Was Always Meant to Write

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 22:54:55 GMT

The Book That Almost Wasn't

For nearly as long as he's been teaching leadership, Pete Behrens has been trying to write about it. In Episode 60 of Relearning Leadership , he shares why it took two decades, several false starts, and one pivotal editorial conversation to finally get it right — and why the version that emerged looks nothing like the book he originally set out to write.

From Models to Stories

Pete built his reputation teaching leadership through structured approaches and proven methods. But when he read an early draft of his book, something was missing. The models were there. The logic was sound. And yet nothing connected. It was only when he leaned into story — raw, personal, and honest — that the book came alive. Into the Fog: Leadership Stories from the Edge of Uncertainty is the result.

Leadership Has Never Been a Solo Act

The episode reads from "Traveling Companions," one of the book's central stories, tracing Pete's leap from corporate leader to solo entrepreneur. What carried him through wasn't a plan — it was people. Colleagues who vouched for him. Friends who showed up. A community that held him accountable when doubt crept in.

Are People Following You—or Just Complying?

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 21:51:47 GMT

The Question That Keeps Senior Leaders Up at Night

You make a decision. The room goes quiet. Heads nod. The plan moves forward. And later, alone, you wonder: Did they agree because it was the right call… or because I'm the one who said it?

In his article "Are People Following You—or Just Complying?" for CEOWORLD Magazine, Pete explores that unspoken question that reveals leadership's most elusive peak—the narrow ridge between authority and respect.

The Diagnostic

Pete offers senior leaders a simple way to assess where they stand: Pay attention to what happens after you speak.

Does conversation continue or cease? Does dissent surface or disappear?

Compliance is silent. Respect speaks—but only when you've proven it's safe to challenge you.

Read the full article at CEOWORLD Magazine.

Act as One: How Salesforce R&D Transformed Through Synchronized Leadership

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 21:29:19 GMT

The Beauty of Synchronized Motion

Watch a crew rowing team glide across the water. When done well, synchronized motion is mesmerizing and powerful. But synchronization requires each member to work seamlessly together—hands at the exact same height, oars dropping into the water at the exact same time, pulling with equal pressure. Any deviation disrupts the boat's balance and performance.

In his article "Act as One" for Emergence , The Journal of Business Agility from the Business Agility Institute , Pete explores what happened when the Salesforce.com R&D leadership team faced this exact challenge. Over Thanksgiving 2006, Pete received a call from their leadership team. They'd gone all-in on an agile transformation with over 300 people. It was everything but synchronized.

From Individual Strength to Collective Performance

For almost seven years, their organization had grown rapidly from a few dozen employees to a few hundred. The result? They were unable to synchronize a customer release for an entire year. Like a class of freshman recruits—all the best of their class, joining for the first time, each striving to prove individual excellence—their strengths worked against collective goals.

Pete worked with the leadership team to make three critical shifts: establishing shared values that replaced individual autonomy with team autonomy, creating shared initiatives that coordinated teams-of-teams toward collective goals, and implementing shared rhythms that enabled alignment without micromanagement.

The results? Salesforce.com doubled their market share against giants like Oracle and SAP while maintaining their core values through dozens of acquisitions and multi-fold growth.

Want to learn more about Pete's work with Salesforce?

Download the complete case study from Agile Leadership Journey

Leadership Without Clarity: Insights from Working on Purpose

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 20:20:37 GMT

When Leaders Think They're Collaborative But Aren't

In this Working on Purpose conversation with Dr. Alise Cortez, Pete explores a challenge many leaders face without realizing it: the inner fog of blind spots.

"The bigger challenge I have is the leaders who think they're this place when they're really back here," Pete explains. "They believe they're collaborative, but in their mind they're just having people agree to them."

Pete shares the story of Rebecca, featured in this book Into the Fog , who courageously spoke up in a leadership session at a healthcare company after a gentleman yelled an expletive. Her authenticity about being overlooked until men repeated her ideas opened the door for others to speak. "It didn't change the culture on that day, but it changed the direction of the culture on that day."

Letting Go Without Helicoptering

When Dr. Cortez asks about what keeps leaders from letting go, Pete reframes the challenge: "If I let go and yet I don't grab something new, I end up being that hovering parent, that helicopter manager." The solution is finding the next rung—a new skill, strategic focus, or area of development.

Pete closes with a reminder: "Technology is a massive fog generator. AI specifically today is an incredible fog navigator, but also fog generator. It's not about the wave or the technology. It's how we're showing up in the mindset we are to address it."

After three decades guiding leaders through uncertainty, Pete's message is clear: "Leadership doesn't begin with clarity. It begins with courage and the choice to step in even when it's not clear."

Watch the full interview

Leading When the Fog Rolls In

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 23:25:44 GMT

In this SmartBrief on Leadership feature, Pete examines what happens when uncertainty settles into an organization—and why people managers feel it first.

They're the frontline interpreters, absorbing confusion while being expected to provide clarity. Caught between what their people need and what the job demands, they carry pressure on both shoulders.

The Fog That Creeps

The Fog isn't always a crisis or pivot point. More often it creeps in quietly: shifting priorities, competing strategies, restructuring, turnover, burnout hiding behind "I'm good."

The mood shifts. Energy zaps. People hesitate. Decisions that used to feel obvious suddenly feel heavier. Even high performers start second-guessing themselves.

A Different Approach

The answer isn't eliminating uncertainty. It's learning to navigate it.

Pete explores how managers can shift from protecting teams from discomfort to building their confidence to navigate it. How to recognize leadership as an act rather than a role, valuing truth-telling over hierarchy. How to keep teams moving through learning rather than waiting for complete information before acting.

The core insight: employees don't expect perfection from their managers. They expect honesty. "I don't know yet, but we'll find our way through this together" builds more engagement than any single right answer.

Organizations that successfully navigate the years ahead will be those with managers skilled at navigating ambiguity and teams confident enough to keep moving when certainty disappears.

Leadership isn't about eliminating the Fog. It's about learning to lead through it.

Originally published in SmartBrief on Leadership, January 30, 2026

From Business Owners to Middle Managers | Pete Behrens

Mon, 19 Jan 2026 22:44:31 GMT

In this Enterprise Radio interview with host Eric Dye, Pete addresses the leadership challenges facing business owners, senior executives, and middle managers navigating uncertainty in fast-moving environments.

Themes Explored

The conversation centers on what Pete calls "the Fog"—where uncertainty meets change. Rather than treating this as a crisis to overcome, Pete reframes it as the reality where modern leadership operates.

For business owners and founders juggling growth, people issues, and constant change, he distinguishes between external market chaos and internal fog—the assumptions, biases, and blind spots that often prove more damaging than market conditions.

Relevance to Different Leadership Levels

Senior Leaders and Business Owners

Pete challenges the pressure to project certainty, introducing the concept of "confidence of humility"—the ability to declare a future without knowing how to get there. He addresses the myth of the hero leader, exploring how to engage teams with problems rather than predetermined solutions.

Middle Managers

Pete speaks directly to those caught between upper leadership and their teams, noting they often feel like a "pipeline" or "conduit." He offers a specific dance: making vision tangible downward while carrying challenges upward—what he describes as "stealing from the rich and giving to the poor" in terms of organizational power.

Individual Contributors

The discussion explores how leadership emerges without titles or authority, making the content relevant for teams accustomed to waiting for direction from the top.

Strategic Pausing in Fast-Moving Businesses

P ete introduces "strategic pausing" as a discipline for fast-moving environments where speed matters. Drawing on the U.S. military principle "slow is smooth, and smooth is fast," he makes the case that pausing isn't the opposite of action—it's what makes action coherent.

The approach is relatable to audiences familiar with working harder but making less progress, offering a counter-narrative to the instinct to power through uncertainty.

Listen to the full interview

Released January 19, 2026 by Enterprise Radio.

Managing the Tension: Insights from Agile Prague

Mon, 15 Sep 2025 22:29:13 GMT

Returning to Agile Prague in 2025, Pete delivers a keynote on leadership in the Fog—examining how leaders can develop the capacity to manage competing forces rather than resolve them.

The Tension Between Competing Rights

Leadership in complex environments rarely presents clear right versus wrong choices. More often, it's right versus right—competing perspectives that both hold validity.

The question isn't which side to choose. It's how to hold the tension between them without letting it tear you or your organization apart.

Three Key Tensions

Expertise versus Openness: Leaders must balance deep knowledge and experience with receptivity to new approaches and perspectives from those they develop.

Authority versus Respect: Positional power creates compliance, but influence requires something earned through relationship and trust.

Demand versus Capacity: Organizations face relentless pressure from stakeholders while teams operate at finite capacity—a tension that can't be solved, only made visible and managed collectively.

Creating Conditions, Not Solutions

The shift: stop absorbing organizational tension alone. Make it visible. Put it on the table where everyone can see it, feel it, and manage it together.

This requires changing not just what decisions get made, but how they get made—moving from leader-as-answer-provider to leader-as-facilitator of better conditions for decision-making.

The message resonates with the Agile Prague community because it addresses what many technical leaders discover: the expertise that got you here won't get you there. The new competency isn't having more answers—it's developing capacity to navigate without them.

Watch the Full Keynote

Keynote delivered at Agile Prague 2025, Prague, Czech Republic

The Future of Leadership Amid AI: World Management Agility Forum

Wed, 06 Nov 2024 22:02:04 GMT

In this panel discussion at the World Management Agility Forum in Portugal, Pete joins Dr. Eric Kihn and Alvin Graylin to explore AI's revolutionary impact on leadership, workplaces, and society—and to introduce the AI Leadership Lab he formed through Agile Leadership Journey.

The Cart Before the Horse

Pete opens by describing the warning signs of AI he felt one year earlier. Leaders he works with were asking the same questions, having the same concerns. The competitive pressure to beat everyone else in the AI gold rush had created a pattern: technology leading leaders, leaders feeling behind.

"We're playing catch-up," Pete observes. This happens with every new technology advancement, but what's different is the polarization—the attachment to AI's wonderful possibilities versus fear of human society's destruction.

Rather than thinking as an AI doomer or optimist, Pete positions himself as a realist exploring the balance between AI's features and leadership's responsibility.

The AI Leadership Lab

The lab formed when Eric Kihn—a PhD physicist who's been using machine learning for decades—asked Pete: "Do you have a class you can teach me on leadership and AI?"

Pete's response: "I don't know. But would you be willing to ask the questions and join some research?"

Pete formed the AI Leadership Lab through Agile Leadership Journey as a cohort-based learning experience for leaders. Not a traditional class, but a group exploring questions together. Eric participated as a member of the lab's advisory team.

The lab became a space for leaders to become more aware of AI technology, understand use cases and capability, and explore how leadership itself and organizations are changing.

The belief Pete brings to the conversation: real truth lies in between. Not just AI. Not just the human side. Some sort of integration between these two. The best leaders will solve this problem not simply from a technology perspective, not by ignoring it, but somewhere in between.

Bridging Science and Business Perspectives

Pete convenes the panel to bridge two different sectors—Eric representing the science and technology perspective where AI has already transformed work over the past decade, and Alvin representing the provocateur voice challenging common AI misconceptions.

The panel explores how leaders can't wait for traditional learning models to catch up. The education system will break because knowledge has become free.

Pete's lab work examines hundreds of leadership use cases—running team meetings, developing strategy, working on culture—and how AI could be applied to each. It looks at leadership capabilities: how leaders show up, what power style they use, how open and adaptive they are.

The Deep Dive Experience

At the conference, Pete also offered a hands-on exploration workshop using a leadership coaching bot created as an experiment by Agile Leadership Journey. Participants interacted directly with the AI tool, exploring what this looks like and what leaders need to think about when using these technologies.

The approach demonstrates Pete's conviction that leaders don't need more answers. They need to develop capacity to navigate without them, to lead with adaptability and critical thinking in a rapidly evolving AI landscape.

Watch the Panel Discussion

Keynote delivered at Agile by Example 2023, Warsaw, Poland

Leadership Without Certainty: Pragmatic Talks Interview

Tue, 19 Dec 2023 20:59:27 GMT

Three Myths Holding Leaders Back

In this Pragmatic Talks conversation with host Wiktor Żołnowski at the Agile by Example conference in Warsaw, Poland—where Pete had just delivered a keynote—the hour-long discussion challenges fundamental assumptions about leadership, vulnerability, and organizational culture.

Myth 1: Great Leaders Are Born

While some innate capabilities help people rise faster, personality traits don't determine better leadership. Organizations promote extroverts over introverts and assertive people over accommodative ones. Yet research shows introverts often make better leaders in complex environments.

"It's not the assertiveness or the accommodativeness that makes you a better leader—it's the balance," Pete explains.

Leadership isn't born. It's made. But it takes work.

Myth 2: Leaders Make the Right Decisions

In today's world, there is no right decision. Strategy A or B? Work from home or the office? There's no right, no wrong.

Better leadership doesn't mean making the right decision. It means being more aware, choosing more consciously, then reflecting: Did that work? What can I learn?

"It's a learning cycle where I'm constantly getting better because I'm constantly seeking data."

Myth 3: Leadership Comes from Titles

Pete recounts employees who would say, "I want that role, that title." His response? "You're not demonstrating you're doing it." Their reply: "Well, if I get the title then I'll do it."

That's not how it works. You get rewarded when you show it. Leadership is all about relationship—not everybody needs the title to be a leader.

From "I Know" to "Maybe I Don't"

About 90% of leaders operate from an "I know" mentality. In complex environments where teams develop things never built before, this mindset shuts others out.

What feels counterintuitive proves most powerful: "I don't know" or "I may not be right" or "I've got an idea but I'm open to others."

Brené Brown calls this "the courage to be vulnerable." That becomes the activator for engagement, empowerment, and better decisions.

"The best leaders we're seeing today are making that shift—from 'I know' to 'maybe I don't.' In one sense it feels weak and vulnerable, but it's probably the most powerful shift we can make."

Culture as Shadow

Edgar Schein describes culture and leadership as two sides of the same coin. You cannot separate them.

Pete offers a memorable metaphor: Culture is like a shadow. You can see it, sense it, but can't touch or change it directly. You can only influence it through other things—governance policies, structures, roles, and how leaders show up every day.

The work isn't changing culture directly. It's making visible the tensions culture reflects and learning to manage them.

Where Change Really Happens

When discussing transformational leaders like Satya Nadella, Pete pushes back on the idea that change can only come from the CEO. The most senior leaders have the most risk, the farthest to fall.

"We actually see more change happen where it's activated by lower layers of the organization. I think the people listening to this podcast are the activators, the catalysts."

Watch the full interview

Recorded December 19, 2023 at Agile by Example Conference, Warsaw, Poland. Pragmatic Talks is produced by Pragmatic Coders.

The Courage and Commitment to Change: Agile by Example

Thu, 14 Dec 2023 20:53:24 GMT

In this keynote at Agile by Example 2023 in Warsaw, Poland, Pete addresses a fundamental question: Why do some organizations "get" agility while others don't?

The answer lies not in techniques or practices, but in courage, commitment, and the activation layer that bridges two different games happening simultaneously.

Two Games, One Organization

Teams adopt Scrum, Kanban, and agile practices. Meanwhile, leadership operates in a different realm with different rules. Pete first noticed this pattern in 2007 while helping organizations implement agile—fifteen years later, the same dynamic persists.

Conferences like Agile by Example attract change agents caught between these two worlds. They're program managers, project managers, and directors sitting on the line between team practices and leadership decisions, feeling the tension most acutely.

Pete calls them the activation layer.

The Activation Layer

Pete challenges the audience directly: "You are the only ones who can make this change because you're the only ones who feel this problem."

Senior leaders feel market pressure, stakeholder pressure, board pressure. That pressure flows to the activation layer. They're the gateway and the bottleneck.

This middle layer experiences the most stress. They're also positioned to make the most difference.

The Mindset Game

Through an interactive exercise, Pete demonstrates how mindset shapes outcomes more than structure or rules. Participants play a simple game revealing different mindsets: competitive (win at all costs), sacrifice (let the other person win), curiosity (why are we even doing this?), and creative (both can win).

The insight: agility isn't just movement—it's the ability to think and understand quickly. Without an agile mindset, agile movement becomes wasted energy, like a dog chasing squirrels.

A 112-Year-Old Insurance Company

Pete shares the story of Amerisure, a 112-year-old insurance company that demonstrated five scrum values in their transformation: courage, openness, focus, commitment, and respect.

They took personal responsibility rather than delegating to consulting firms. They went organization-wide rather than starting small. They made their own recipe rather than following packaged solutions. And crucially, their leaders went into the classroom—not to learn Scrum, but to develop as agile leaders.

The results emerged over four years of continuous investment. Marginal gains compounding year after year. Recognition for innovation in AI and platform services. Culture data showing alignment improving across the organization.

The transformation took courage to change when their backs weren't against the wall, openness to learning something new, focus on innovation rather than agility itself, commitment through four years of reinvestment, and respect for the time and process required.

The Moral

The story's moral isn't that senior leaders are required for transformation. It's that any leadership team—any group with the courage, openness, focus, commitment, and respect—can make these changes.

It started because someone living on the line had the courage to invite leaders to that first session.

Pete closes by asking the audience to identify one thing they might do after leaving the conference to help break the line down, to help someone cross it, to bridge the gap between the games teams play and the games leaders play.

Watch the Full Keynote

Keynote delivered at Agile by Example 2023, Warsaw, Poland

Navigating the Fog: Four Pillars of Agile Leadership

Mon, 11 Dec 2023 20:47:48 GMT

In this Training Journal feature , Pete explores how leaders can develop agility—one of the most significant meta-skills for operating in highly disruptive environments. The speed and complexity generate a fog that impedes vision and makes planning efforts feel useless.

Agility isn't the antithesis of vision and planning. It's a complementary skill to improve outcomes despite these impediments.

Redefining Agility

Most definitions focus on quick adaptive movement—navigating an obstacle course. But complete definitions include quick adaptive thought: scanning more options and deciding more quickly on a more effective path forward.

Without agility in thought, agility in movement is just wasted energy.

Four Pillars

Be Clear: Keep the Vision

Many see agility as the opposite of vision when it's actually in service to vision. When leaders are unclear about where they're headed, decisions cannot be deemed good or bad because there's nothing to measure them against.

In complex situations, the road ahead becomes foggy. Off-course is only recognizable if there's a plan or vision that keeps people connected. Agile leaders revisit vision more frequently—annual cycles with quarterly, monthly, and bi-weekly sub-cycles to review and adjust.

Be Curious: Open Your Mindset

Vision plays two roles: first as a goal, next as the ability to see in the moment. Agility in action requires the ability to see, discern, and act—all at a moment's notice.

In predictable environments, education and past experiences help decide what to do. In complex situations, they may or may not be helpful. Agile leaders are specialists in scanning their environment, seeing multiple options, engaging others, and taking clear action—all in real-time. They possess an open mindset: open to possibilities, new paths, others' perspectives, and even being wrong.

Be Courageous: Take Bold Steps

Agile leadership is the ability to take action without having all the information. One tenet of agility: learning by doing. In complex environments, experimentation is required and decisions require bold steps into the unknown.

Get comfortable with being uncomfortable.

This doesn't mean being a daredevil. The U.S. military has a saying: "Go slow to go fast." Taking more time to decide the "right" option saves time later spent going down the "wrong" path and having to backtrack.

Be Contemplative: Reflect Frequently

While agile leaders need to see, discern, and act quickly, they also need to reflect. All the time. One of our biggest weaknesses: cognitive bias. We don't see ourselves for who we are.

Incorporate reflection in daily practice. After a meeting, reflect on focus and effectiveness. At the end of the day, reflect on wins and challenges.

For agile leaders, winning means becoming more aware. Even if awareness arrives late, celebrate every time you become aware of something new—that's growth.

Be clear, curious, courageous, and contemplative and you'll grow as an agile leader—but give it time. It requires practice and you'll fail more than you'll succeed. That's okay.

Originally published in Training Journal, December 11, 2023.

The 70/70 Rule: Pete Behrens and David Ritter on Transformation

Sun, 29 Oct 2023 21:52:07 GMT

In this Relearning Leadership episode , Pete and David Ritter—Senior Advisor at Boston Consulting Group and member of the Agile Leadership Journey Guide Community—explore what leaders should know about transformation. Their exchange reveals practical insights about bridging executive intent and team reality.

The Games Leaders and Teams Play

The central question: How do you bridge the gap between the games leaders play and the games teams play?

David introduces the 70/70 rule—transformation should be 70% top-down and 70% bottom-up, because the 40% overlap is where change actually occurs. Pete recognizes this immediately as a new way to think about the intersection between the two games.

Crossing the Barrier

The conversation identifies what's missing: executives don't cross over enough. The simple step that changes everything? Visit the team. Two hours a week at sprint reviews builds the relationship, transparency, and communication that creates transformation.

Pete draws from his experience joining senior leadership on European manufacturing tours—day after day at different plants, seeing the power of management by walking around, even at global scale.

Courage and Patience

Two qualities emerge as essential: courage and persistence. Pete frames the challenge many executives face: "When are we going to land this plane?'—that project-end milestone. You say courage. I agree. I also say patience. The concept of an investment that has to be reinvested takes a patience that I think a lot of executives don't have." That project-end mindset conflicts with transformation as continuous investment.

David's experience confirms the tendency for organizations to revert to the norm is incredibly strong. Without both courage and patience, organizations set expectations they can't meet—sometimes leaving them worse off than when they started.

Two Key Insights

First: Pay attention to something. Put a spotlight on it. Gather people around it.

Second: The 70/70 rule explicitly provides the overlap where transformation occurs—not the typical 50/50 split between cascading and laddering.

The discussion reinforces why executives who drive agile transformation with traditional project plans miss the fundamental shift required: transformation needs continuous improvement, not discrete endpoints.

Heat Experiences and Learning Agility with Jasmine Keel

Mon, 15 Feb 2021 22:15:23 GMT

In this Relearning Leadership episode title The Future Leader , Pete and Jasmine Keel—Head of Research and Insights at Swiss Re—explore what research reveals about leadership in turbulent times. Their discussion challenges conventional assumptions about what makes leaders successful.

The Cup Metaphor

Jasmine introduces a powerful metaphor for leadership development: imagine a cup. Most development programs focus on adding content to the cup—digital skills, AI, machine learning. But what increases the size of the cup itself?

The answer: heat experiences. Put yourself in roles where you must drive change and transformation. Work in teams where performance depends on collective success. Don't go for easy jobs.

But heat experiences alone aren't enough. Without reflection, they're wasted. Jasmine shares three daily questions one leader asks: How was I supporting other people today? When was I at my best? What did I learn about myself as a leader?

This combination—challenging experiences wrapped in purposeful reflection—builds what organizations now assess as learning agility: the ability and willingness to learn from experience and apply that learning to new situations.

The Quiet Vision

Pete explores what's changed in leadership requirements. Jasmine's research reveals a shift: "To be the future leader, you don't need to be this dynamic, charismatic, super-cool leader. No, you need a clear, quiet vision and really an understanding of why you get out of your bed and why other people should follow you."

This centered personal purpose acts like the eye of a storm—calm in the center while turbulence swirls around. Swiss Re now takes senior leaders on three-and-a-half-day CEO-sponsored retreats to reflect on heat experiences and refine personal purpose.

The New Social Contract

The conversation turns to connection. Research from Adecco shows 74% of employees want managers to demonstrate empathy and a supportive attitude. Jasmine calls this the new social contract between employees and leaders.

For senior positions, Swiss Re assesses candidates not just through interviews but by calling previous employees, neighbors, even spouses. They're looking for evidence of emotional intelligence that shows up in daily life, not just professional settings.

Eight Emotional Derailers

Pete and Jasmine discuss why CEOs fail. It's rarely about competency—it's about character and lack of self-reflection. Research identifies eight emotional and behavioral derailers that prevent leaders from reaching senior positions:

Arrogance. Charisma complex. Habitual distrust. Aloofness. Volatility. Excessive caution. Perfectionism. Eagerness to please.

Most senior leaders exhibit one to three of these if they haven't explicitly worked to manage them. Positive characteristics can only take you so far—without managing the derailers, you may have already hit your leadership ceiling.

Three Pieces of Advice

Pete asks Jasmine what she'd tell her 18-year-old daughter at the dinner table. Her answer:

Connect as many experiences as you can. Go for experiences that make you uncomfortable—that's where the stretch is.

Don't lose your personal vision on the path. This is what grounds you and helps you emerge as an authentic leader who stands for something.

Strengthen your networks. Have powering partners who bring outside-in perspective. If you don't know, other people might guide, coach, or mentor you.

The conversation reinforces a fundamental shift: leadership development isn't about adding skills—it's about increasing capacity through purposeful challenge and reflection.