The Resilient Entrepreneur, Edition #123

Hi there

I hope you had a great week!

Here are the topics in today's edition:

• Why Is Leadership So Difficult?
• The Shared Mental Model: Harder to Build Than You Think

Please reach out with comments, questions, or suggestions for articles!

Talk soon,
Tom

TACTICS FOR RESILIENT ENTREPRENEURS

Why Is Leadership So Difficult?

If leadership were simple, we wouldn’t need models, training, or leaders at all. Here’s what makes leadership so hard.

Recently, I was teaching a crisis management course at the University of Lucerne. In contrast to a normal lecture, the course consisted of a five-day crisis simulation, during which participants had to address multiple problems simultaneously: flooding, migration, energy shortages, and a pandemic. They did so as a crisis response team that was constantly bombarded with new situations, an overwhelming amount of information, and a plethora of conflicts and dilemmas.

The course was jointly held with the Swiss Armed Forces and used its recently reworked leadership model. The model is not fundamentally different from what it was before. It doesn’t require a new leadership style or a novel leadership theory. However, it put three aspects on the same level: The mission, the people, and the organization.

The Model: Command – Leadership – Management

Whatever business you are in, you have to fulfill a mission. This can be a combat mission in the military, running a crisis response team, or adding value for your customers in business. Irrespective of the product you are offering, fulfilling a mission is easier said than done: That’s because the mission is not always clearly stated, so very often (but not always!) leaders have to define their own mission. If you are a leader and you define the missions for your teams, that’s even harder than defining your own mission. Defining challenging but executable missions is a core component of what we call command.

A leader without a team cannot do anything. Leaders are generalists — they don’t know anything but can connect the dots between different areas of expertise. Leaders are completely lost without a network of people who can help them. So leadership requires putting people at the center stage. If you don’t, they won’t be able to help you accomplish your mission.

If you have a great team focused on its mission but acting without any coordination, you will never win the battle. Somebody needs to set the beat and make the rules for everyone to work efficiently. That’s what companies call management, and it also applies to the military and to crises.

The Right Dose

At the end of the crisis management course I was teaching, each participant had to wrap up their learning in a short presentation.

One participant summed up the command-management-leadership model perfectly by using this visualization:

Even though command, leadership, and management are equally important, the importance of each aspect can vary over time. Sometimes, you have to take care of an urgent new mission, shortcutting existing processes and cultural norms. Sometimes, uniting the team before embarking on a new mission is essential. And sometimes, setting up processes and structures to employ your team effectively is more important than fast results.

Conclusion

Leadership is difficult. If it were simple, we wouldn’t need leadership models, leadership training, and in the end, leaders at all.

But why is leadership so difficult? Because despite all the beautiful leadership models, the world isn’t black-and-white. Reality doesn’t always adhere to models, and people don’t always behave as expected. That’s why leaders should always strive to apply the right dose of command, leadership, and management.

Does this still sound too theoretical? We have illustrated the command-leadership-management model in a book using Lucas, a fictitious persona, who battles all sorts of challenges. Maybe you discover part of yourself when you read it.

STRATEGIES FOR RESILIENT ENTREPRENEURS

The Shared Mental Model: Harder to Build Than You Think

Everyone thinks they’re on the same page. Almost nobody is. A shared mental model isn’t a meeting or a slide deck; it’s hard mental work.

"Let’s make sure we’re on the same page.” That’s a frequent statement in professional life,

yet are you sure of what it means? Very often, people refer to the concept of a shared mental model when they are using this sentence.

Let’s dive into a quick theoretical definition. A shared mental model is a collective understanding, representation, or mental picture of a task, goal, or team process held by a group’s members. It is the invisible framework that enables people to anticipate each other’s needs, communicate efficiently, and collaborate seamlessly without constant explanation.

That’s a heavy definition. Let’s look at it in the light of a few real-world examples.

Software Engineering

As the Founder & CEO of Yonder, a B2B SaaS company, I’m still heavily involved in product management. Very often, a new feature begins life as a brainchild of a single person.

The first round of shared mental modeling usually takes place with our product team. It’s only a team of four people, but aligning what a feature should and shouldn’t do is hard work. It often takes multiple rounds to align the product team to have a shared mental model for a new feature.

Now, enter the development team. Before we start developing a feature or even writing JIRA tickets, the product team presents the new feature’s core concepts to the development team. The idea is to expand the shared mental model from the product team to the development team. Quite often, the development team raises valid points on technical feasibility at this stage. They need to be reflected in the shared mental model for the new feature, or you’re setting yourself up for failure.

Even though we invest lots of time in creating shared mental models for new features, it doesn’t always work out 100%. Sometimes, I get questions from the development team when a feature is nearly complete, and I ask myself, “Why does this question come up now?” More often than not, this is a sign that we didn’t create a fully shared mental model earlier on.

Crisis Management

Change of scene. Recently, I was teaching a crisis management course at the University of Lucerne. In contrast to a normal lecture, the course consisted of a five-day crisis simulation, during which participants had to address multiple problems simultaneously: flooding, migration, energy shortages, and a pandemic. They did so as a crisis response team that was constantly bombarded with new situations, an overwhelming amount of information, and a plethora of conflicts and dilemmas.

In such a crisis, nobody has the full picture of what’s really going on. That’s why crises are usually chaotic, at least when they break out. Creating a shared mental model in a crisis means verifying and externalizing information. That’s typically achieved by creating a visual situation map and holding regular situation briefings.

Even when you emphasize synchronizing information across the crisis response team, simple misunderstandings will occur during every crisis: Are we talking about 6 casualties now, or just 4? Like in software engineering, creating a shared mental model is difficult during a crisis.

Organization

Back to business life. Whenever things go sideways or major changes occur, companies tend to reorganize. We need a bigger sales team. Let’s split the development team into two. Let’s merge the two sales organizations after we acquired that other company.

The list of examples is endless, yet it’s fair to say that most reorganizations fail. Why? I guess it’s because the designers of the reorganization didn’t create a shared mental model with the people affected by the reorganization.

Strategy

Reorganizations are often mistaken for strategy-making. But that’s wrong. In entrepreneurship, strategy is connected to which markets you serve, what products you offer, and how you make money from those activities. And yes, at some point, strategy-making involves deciding whether or not to sell your company.

Creating a shared mental model for strategic decisions works similarly to the software engineering example described above: In a first phase, you need to create a shared mental model among your co-founders. And yes, co-founders might have different strategic views and, in some cases, even differing interests.

Only now can you start the second phase of strategic alignment: Involving your board. And once again, you might encounter different strategic views and differing interests, as your board will represent the investors.

Conclusion

Call it shared mental model, call it alignment, call it being on the same page: It doesn’t matter. The main thing is that you take the effort to create mental unity before proceeding with any important decision.

You might argue that those discussions are inefficient. They might look inefficient at first, but in the long run, they almost always prove very effective.

Nevertheless, it’s fair to say that creating shared mental models is difficult. Even if you invest a lot of time and energy into it, you will sometimes get it wrong.

What can you do? Just as with any difficult task, get up and just start. Your shared mental model skills will improve with practice. What are you waiting for?

About Me

I’m a tech entrepreneur, active reserve officer, and father of three — writing about entrepreneurship, leadership, and crisis management from hard-won experience. No AI, no fluff, no promos. Just plain-text insights for people building and leading under pressure.

When I’m not solving problems, I find clarity in the mountains around Zermatt.

If this was useful, here’s how to get more:

📌 All my articles, no paywall — read everything in one place. Visit the blog.​

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