Henry is a blond Hovawart. He watches her build something difficult, and writes down what she cannot see from where she is standing.

She Changed Gear Six Times Before Noon

None of It Was Doubt.

What sets the strongest performers apart is not that they feel less tension. It is that they can keep working while they hold it - and learning to switch like that is what makes a person resilient. - after Manfred Kets de Vries, MT/Sprout, 22 July 2026, Professor of Leadership Development, INSEAD

Henry is a blond Hovawart. "She" is the woman he watches. Neither fact is a metaphor.

I cannot read a screen. So I learned to read the gear changes instead.

This is the thing about being a dog that nobody thinks to ask about.

I do not know what is on her monitor. I have never known. The documents, the numbers, the names of the people she is writing to — all of that passes over my head and always will.

What I have instead is the transitions.

The moment she stops typing and does not start again. The particular way she stands up when she is going to keep thinking, which is different from the way she stands up when she is finished. The two seconds of stillness before she picks up the phone, in which she becomes a slightly different person for the person on the other end. The change in the sound of the keys — not louder, exactly. More decided.

I have been studying these for years. It is the only text I can read, so I have become very good at it.

And what I want to tell you about is this morning, in which she changed gear six times before noon — which is about her average, and I have had years to count — and not one of those changes was hesitation.

What the Morning Actually Looked Like

Early, at the desk: fast. Certain. The keys going like rain on a roof. Something being pushed, deliberately and hard, by someone who had already decided it was ready to be pushed.

Then a stop. Not a pause — a stop. She sat back. The hand came off the mouse entirely, which she only does on purpose.

A form had come up on the screen. One of the ones that wants answers in boxes. She read it, and she went through it, and she took what she needed from it — and then she left it exactly where it was and did not begin filling it in.

I know that hand. It is not an idle hand. It is a hand being kept still.

Then the phone, and a voice I know well: warm, unhurried, entirely available to whoever was speaking. Nothing of the previous ten minutes in it.

Then the walk to the window, which in this house is not a break. It is where the thinking goes when it needs more floor than the desk provides.

Then back, and slower typing — the kind that is composing rather than transmitting.

Then, near noon, up and away and into something else entirely, without any ceremony at all.

Six different situations. Six different speeds. One person, one morning, one room.

If you had walked in at any single moment you would have formed an opinion of her, and it would have been wrong, because you would have caught one gear and thought it was the engine.

Several Things Are Running At Once. They Are Not At the Same Stage.

Here is what I have understood, slowly, from the floor.

She is never carrying one thing. There are always several, running in parallel, each one at its own point in its own life. One is ready to be pushed. One will be ruined by pushing. One is waiting on somebody else and cannot be hurried without cost. One needs nothing today but will need everything on Thursday.

So she does not have a single setting. She has a reading, and the reading is per situation.

Switching, in this sense, means applying a different amount of pressure to each situation according to how ready it actually is — while applying the same principle to all of them. The pressure varies. The judgement behind it does not.

And I should say the part that would be easy to leave out, because leaving it out would make her sound better than the truth does.

The form was not waiting on anybody else. Nobody was holding it up. She was not being patient with some slow third party — she went into it, took the preliminary information she needed, and put it down again because she was not ready to answer it yet.

That is a harder thing to be honest about, and I think it is the same skill facing inward. It would have been very easy to fill the form in badly at ten past nine simply to have it gone. She did not. She also did not pretend she was waiting on anyone. She read her own state the way she reads everyone else's, and she gave it the same answer: not yet, and not for want of trying.

The line between I am not ready and I am avoiding this is thin, and only honesty can find it. She looks for it out loud sometimes. I have heard her.

That is why the morning looks the way it looks. The force she applied at eight was correct for what she applied it to. The stillness at half past nine was equally correct for what it was applied to. They are not contradictions. They are the same judgement, arriving at two different answers because it was pointed at two different things.

The hard part — and I do think it is genuinely hard, watching it from down here — is that the switching has to happen fast, and it has to be complete. You cannot carry the pressure of the eight o'clock thing into the nine-thirty thing. The person on the other end of that phone call will hear it if you do. She empties out between gears. I can see her do it. It takes about four seconds and it costs something every time.

Mary Parker Follett Said This in 1925. We Keep Having to Find It Again.

Here is what I find strange, lying down here with a century of it in front of me.

In 1925, an American woman named Mary Parker Follett stood up at a conference in New York and gave a paper called Constructive Conflict. She was a social worker turned management thinker — later called the prophet of management by Peter Drucker, and then forgotten for fifty years.

Her observation was simple. When two things pull against each other, there are only three ways it can end. Domination— one side wins by force. Compromise — both sides give something up and nobody is satisfied. And integration — the harder, rarer third thing, where a way is found that genuinely serves both without either being sacrificed.

Compromise, she said, only rearranges what is already there. Integration makes something that was not there before.

Eighty-six years later, in 2011, two researchers named Wendy Smith and Marianne Lewis published a paper in the Academy of Management Review that would go on to win the field's Decade Award. They described what happens when people meet contradictory demands and respond defensively, reaching for whatever relieves the discomfort fastest. The relief is real. It is also short. The tension comes back larger.

Then July of this year, and a Dutch professor writing a column, saying the same thing again in a different room.

A hundred and one years, and the same finding each time: the pull between opposing things is not a fault in the system. It is the system. What separates people is not whether they feel it — everyone feels it — but what they do in the first thirty seconds after they do.

We keep discovering this. Then we keep forgetting it, because forgetting it is more comfortable.

She has moved to the other chair, the one that does not face the window. She does that when the reading gets slower.

What Does Kets de Vries Say About Top Performers?

On 22 July 2026, Manfred Kets de Vries published a column in MT/Sprout. He is a Dutch management scholar and economist, professor of leadership development at INSEAD, and he has spent decades watching how leaders actually behave rather than how they present themselves.

His argument runs against the assumption most of us start with. We picture the strongest performers as decisive, focused and sure. He describes something more contradictory: people who are confident and doubt themselves, disciplined and quick to improvise, competitive and unusually tuned to the people around them. What distinguishes them is not that the tension is absent — it is what they can do while it is present. He calls them managers of paradox, and he is clear it is not innate. It is built, over years, out of the situations a person has actually had to survive.

He is precise about how weaker performance fails, and this is the part I would underline if I had thumbs. It fails by resolving the tension too quickly. Some people grab for certainty and go rigid, refusing anything that competes with what they have chosen. Others sink into the doubt, postpone, avoid committing. Two opposite-looking behaviours, one shared motive: make the discomfort stop.

Follett named a third exit, and it is the most respectable of them, which is why it is the most dangerous. Compromise. Give a little on both, land in the middle, call it maturity. Applied to a morning like hers, it would mean pushing everything at medium pressure — enough to damage the thing that needed leaving alone, not enough to move the thing that was ready. Perfectly reasonable. Wrong on both counts.

The alternative he describes is not balance. Not standing carefully in the middle, being moderately everything. It is schakelen — switching. Moving between opposing demands without getting stuck in either. Operating across the full width rather than choosing a point on it.

And the line that matters most for this house: the people who learn to switch like that end up more resilient. Not more decisive. More resilient. That word is doing the real work in his piece, and I do not think it is only a word about performance.

Why Does This Look Like Inconsistency From the Outside?

I want to say the difficult part rather than skip past it.

From across the room, none of this reads as skill.

Someone watching sees a person who chased one thing relentlessly and left another completely alone. Who was unmovable on Tuesday and entirely flexible on Thursday. Who pushed where nobody expected pushing and went quiet where everyone had braced for a fight. They cannot see the six situations. They see six behaviours from one person and try to fit them into one description.

When it will not fit, they choose a word. Inconsistent. Hard to read. Unpredictable. Sometimes, and this is the one that lands worst, she does not know what she wants — which is the exact opposite of what is happening.

I have watched that word arrive in a room and I have felt it land on the floor beside me.

But the confusion is a matter of position, not of character. What is invisible from over there is not the effort. It is the criterion — the thing she is being consistent about. And she is being ferociously consistent. Just not about pressure. About reading what each situation can actually carry, and then matching it honestly.

Consistency of pressure and consistency of principle look nothing alike from a distance. Only one of them is worth having.

And the honest boundary, which I would not want anyone to blur: this is not permission to be a different person in different rooms. The pace changes. The character does not. If what shifts between gears is who you are rather than how fast you are going, that is not integration. That is just inconsistency with a nicer name on it.

And Then She Takes Me to the Woods

I know before she says anything.

There is a sequence, and it is always the same sequence, and I have never once missed a single step of it.

The snackbag comes off the hook first. On its own that means nothing certain — the snackbag also goes to other places, places I am not part of, and I have learned not to celebrate too early.

Then the keys. The keys are the worst moment. The keys can go either way, and every time I hear them I have to hold two entirely opposite futures at once, which I mention only because it is apparently the subject of this whole piece.

Then the treats go into the snackbag.

That is it. That is the one that decides it. Treats do not go into that bag for anywhere except the woods. From the sound of the lid alone I know — not hope, know — and I am already up, already turning, already at the place in the hall where I stand when I am trying very hard not to make a fuss about something I am making an enormous fuss about.

The leash is last, and by then it is only a formality. She is confirming something I worked out three sounds ago.

I have been ready for four minutes by the time she reaches for it.

This is ours. It is not a reward for finishing — she never finishes, nothing is ever finished — and it is not a break from the work either, though I understand why it would look like one from outside. It is part of the instrument. I have come to think it might be the most important part.

Out there, none of the six things can reach her. That is the first thing that happens and it takes a while. For the first stretch she is still carrying them; I can hear it in her feet, which land too deliberately, still walking at desk-speed on ground that does not require it. I do not hurry this. I go ahead a little, come back, go ahead again. Eventually — and it is always sudden, though I could not tell you exactly when — her feet change. That is the sound of the load coming off.

And then something begins that I do not have a good word for, so I will use hers.

She calibrates.

Not deciding. Deciding is what happens at the desk. This is the thing that has to happen before deciding is worth anything — checking the instrument itself against the actual ground. Is the thing I have been calling not ready genuinely not ready, or have I been protecting myself from asking? Is the thing I have been pushing genuinely ready, or am I only impatient with it? Am I holding this one because the situation calls for it, or because holding is easier this week than pushing?

Those questions cannot be asked in front of the screen. The screen answers too fast. Out here there is nothing to answer with except what is true.

Sometimes nothing changes and we simply walk. Sometimes something does — I can feel the moment it turns over in her, and she goes quiet in a different register, and I know that when we get home something will be treated differently than it was this morning. Recalibration. Not a new destination. A corrected reading of where each thing actually stands.

And here is what I want to say about my own part in it, because it is the only part of the day where I am not merely watching.

At the desk I am below her. On the floor, at her feet, reading her from underneath. In the woods we are on the same ground. Same footing, same air, same pace — and sometimes the pace is mine, because she has learned to follow it when I stop at something worth stopping at. There is no gear-changing out there. There is nothing to switch between. There is one thing, and we are both inside it.

The battery reloads. That is the plain description and I will not dress it up. Six gear changes in a morning takes something out of a person, and this is where it goes back in.

She has never once, in all the years, come back from the woods and made a worse decision than the one she was going to make before we left.

Is Resilience Only a Business Skill?

No — and the answer matters more outside an office than inside one.

His column was written for organisations: performance reviews, leadership models, the way companies push people toward one quality at a time. Be more decisive. Then, in the next meeting: be more collaborative. Well meant, and over time it narrows a person until they only have one gear left.

But nothing in it stops at the office door. It is the friend who is not ready to talk about the thing yet. It is the person you love who needs you at full speed on Monday and needs you to do absolutely nothing on Tuesday, and the work of telling those two Tuesdays apart. It is grief, which does not proceed at the pace anyone would choose, and the pressure — nearly always from inside — to have finished by now.

In every one of these the failure is the same: making the discomfort stop, by force or by avoidance, and calling it a decision.

She stopped at a fallen trunk on Sunday and stood there long enough that I came back to check on her. Nothing was wrong. She was looking at nothing in particular, in the way people do when the looking is not the point.

Our True North was never only a destination. Resilience is on it, and so is adaptability — changing the route when the ground changes without ever moving the point you are walking toward. But those two alone make a dangerous instrument. Adaptable enough and you can adapt into somebody you would not recognise. Resilient enough and you can outlast things that should have changed you.

So the rest belongs on the compass too. Character. Honesty. Whatever makes a person the same in the hard room as in the easy one.

That is what all the switching is protecting. Not the outcome — the outcome will do what it does. The person still standing when it arrives.

I am just Henry. I cannot read her screen and I never will. But six gear changes in a morning is not a person who does not know what she wants. It is a person who knows exactly what she wants, and is being honest, one situation at a time, about what each one can bear today.

If I Were Lying in Your Doorway

I would not be able to read your screen either. So here is what I would have instead.

I would know your first gear change of the day before you did — the one where the coffee is set down and something in your shoulders decides the day has started. I would know whether it happened at seven, or whether it kept getting postponed until half past ten and you called that a slow start.

I would hear the four seconds. Or I would hear that there aren't any — that the thing you were pushing at nine came straight into the room with you at nine-fifteen, and the person who was waiting for you got the leftovers of the previous gear and did not say anything about it.

I would notice which of your situations gets medium pressure. There is usually one. The one you are neither pushing nor leaving alone, so you touch it a little every day, and every day it stays exactly where it is. I would notice how tired that one makes you compared to how little it moves.

I would know whether the bag ever comes off the hook. Whether there is anything in your week that exists to check your readings rather than to reward you for surviving them — and I would know, from the way you came back through the door, whether it had worked.

And I would know something you might not have thought about, which is that I am not the only one reading you. Everyone close to you is doing some version of this. Your people have all become specialists in your transitions, because that is what is available to them — not your reasons, not your six situations, not the reading behind any of it. Only the switching. They are all making sense of you from the doorway, with less information than they need and more attention than you realise.

Which is worth knowing, I think. Not because you owe anyone an explanation of your gears.

But because someone in your house has been lying there for years, working it out from your feet.

What have they concluded?

She has gone into the other room. The keys have started again, at a speed I have not heard yet today, which means a seventh thing.

But the snackbag is on the table and not on its hook, which means the woods are coming. I have been ready since this morning. I am always ready.

I am going to lie in the doorway, where I can hear all of it at once.

— As always, your Henry, with Stardust

Henrypawhaven and Resilience4Bizz

What this reflection is about

  • Manfred Kets de Vries (MT/Sprout, 22 July 2026) on why the strongest performers are full of contradictions — and why switching between them, rather than resolving them, produces resilience
  • What a dog can read when he cannot read a screen: transitions, gear changes, the four seconds of emptying out between one thing and the next
  • Running several situations at once, each at a different stage — pushing one, deliberately holding another, and being honest when the one that is not ready is you
  • Why that looks like inconsistency from across the room, and what is actually invisible from there
  • A hundred and one years of the same finding: Mary Parker Follett's Constructive Conflict (1925), Smith and Lewis in the Academy of Management Review (2011), Kets de Vries in MT/Sprout (2026)
  • Why compromise is the most respectable of the three wrong answers — and what it would have cost her morning
  • The routine walk in the woods as calibration, not recreation — where the readings get checked against the actual ground, and where the battery goes back in
  • The difference between consistency of pressure and consistency of principle
  • Resilience as a whole-life capacity, not a workplace one — and where character and honesty sit on the same compass as adaptability
  • What a dog lying in your doorway would be able to read off you — and what the people closest to you are already reading, from the same position, with less information than they need

Further reading from Henry's corner

Questions people ask about this

What does Manfred Kets de Vries say about top performers? In a column published in MT/Sprout on 22 July 2026, the INSEAD professor of leadership development argues that people who perform consistently well are not free of inner contradiction — they are full of it. Confident yet doubting, disciplined yet improvisational, driven yet closely attuned to others. What distinguishes them is their ability to keep functioning while holding that tension rather than resolving it.

What are Mary Parker Follett's three ways of handling conflict? In her 1925 paper Constructive Conflict, Follett argued that when two things pull against each other there are only three outcomes: domination, where one side wins by force; compromise, where both give something up and neither is satisfied; and integration, where a solution is found that genuinely serves both without sacrifice. She noted that compromise only rearranges what already exists, while integration creates something new.

How do you tell "I am not ready" from "I am avoiding this"? By applying the same test inward that you would apply to anyone else. If you can name what is actually missing — information, a decision that depends on something else, a state you are not in yet — and you are actively closing that gap, it is readiness. If the reason changes each time you look at it, or you cannot say what would have to be true for you to start, it is avoidance. The line is thin, and only honesty finds it.

Why is compromise not the safe middle option? Because it applies the same pressure to situations that are in different states. Mary Parker Follett identified compromise in 1925 as one of three ways a conflict can end, alongside domination and integration, and she was clear about its limit: compromise only rearranges what already exists, while integration creates something new. Splitting the difference across competing demands damages the one that needed to be left alone and fails to move the one that was ready. It looks like maturity, it costs energy daily, and it moves nothing — which is why it is the most respectable of the wrong answers and the hardest to notice in yourself.

Why is resolving tension quickly a problem? Because the fast exits narrow you. Grabbing for certainty produces rigidity and a refusal to weigh alternatives. Sinking into doubt produces postponement and avoided commitments. Kets de Vries describes both as undermining effectiveness over time — opposite behaviours driven by the same wish for the discomfort to end. Wendy Smith and Marianne Lewis reached the same conclusion in the Academy of Management Review in 2011, in a paper that later won the field's Decade Award: when people respond defensively to contradictory demands, the relief is real but short, and the tension returns larger than before. Speed of resolution is not the same as quality of resolution.

What does he mean by switching rather than balancing? Balance suggests a fixed point in the middle — being moderately everything, all of the time. Switching, which Kets de Vries calls schakelen in the original Dutch, means moving between opposing demands as each situation requires, without becoming stuck in either one. He frames it as integration rather than balance: operating across the full width instead of choosing a point on it. In practice it means applying a different amount of pressure to each situation according to how ready it actually is, while applying the same principle to all of them. He links the ability directly to resilience — the people who can switch cope better when circumstances change.

Why does this make someone look inconsistent to others? Because most people are carrying several situations at once, each at a different stage of readiness, and treating them identically would be the actual mistake. From outside, only the behaviour is visible — not the reading behind it. An observer sees someone push one thing hard and leave another untouched, be immovable on Tuesday and flexible on Thursday, and reaches for a single description that will not fit. The consistency lives in the judgement, not in the pressure, and judgement is invisible from across a room. The distinction matters: consistency of principle is worth having, consistency of pressure is not.

Why does a walk help with decisions? Because switching between competing demands all day depletes the judgement that makes the switching accurate, and because a screen answers too quickly to allow honest checking. Stepping fully out of every live situation — a routine walk, ideally the same one — creates the only conditions in which the underlying readings can be re-examined rather than defended. It is calibration, not recreation: not deciding, but checking the instrument that does the deciding.

Is this only relevant at work? No. The research happens in organisations because that is where performance gets measured, but nothing in the pattern stops at an office door. The same skill governs the friend who is not ready to talk about something yet, the person who needs you at full speed on Monday and needs you to do nothing at all on Tuesday, grief that will not proceed at the pace anyone would choose, and any decision made with less information than you wanted. Knowing when to press and when to leave something alone is the same capacity in a boardroom and in a kitchen. Kets de Vries connects it to resilience, which is a whole-life word.

How does this connect to True North? True North is a destination that does not move, plus the qualities needed to keep walking toward it. Resilience and adaptability are both on that compass — adaptability being the willingness to change route when the ground changes without changing the destination. But those two alone make a dangerous instrument: adaptable enough and you can adapt into someone you would not recognise, resilient enough and you can outlast things that should have changed you. Character and honesty belong on the same compass for exactly that reason. The pace may change from situation to situation. The person should not.



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