When you know what’s coming before you’ve even listened. It’s something the people around you recognise too. The meeting starts. Someone presents the situation. And before they have finished, the experienced leader already knows where this is going. Knows who will say what. Knows which solution will work. Has seen this before, perhaps ten times, perhaps hundreds.
That experience is valuable. The organisation pays for it.
But in that same moment, something else happens that is rarely named: the leader has stopped listening. Not out of ill will. The brain has simply done its job, building routine behaviour that frees up capacity for more complex thinking. In neuroscience, this is called automatic processing. In everyday language, it’s autopilot.
Autopilot is efficient. But it is also blind.
The reactions that have become most automatic are precisely the ones you cannot see yourself: the way you respond to criticism, the way you close down or open up space for others, the way your body communicates before you have said a word. Others see them. You don’t.
There is something paradoxical here: the more experience you have as a leader, the more blind spots you may have. Not because experience makes you worse, but because experience makes invisible whatever you no longer need to choose consciously.
As a psychologist, I am interested in what happens to a person who never ends up in a situation where the old script doesn’t work. Who never faces an environment where the familiar cues are missing. The answer is simple and slightly uncomfortable: they don’t grow. They optimise. That is not the same thing.
Growth requires disruption. Something that doesn’t fit the existing map.
Research on experiential learning has shown this repeatedly: the strongest and most lasting changes in leadership behaviour happen outside a leader’s own operating environment. The first systematic findings came from Australia, and they were so clear that they eventually changed how leadership development was understood. The focus shifted to learning from experience, and practical, hands-on exercises were introduced. At the heart of this new knowledge, however, was what is known as out-of-class learning. Instead of practising in a simulated setting, participants lead in a real environment where they genuinely have to deliver results.
Out-of-class learning does not just produce different learning experiences. It produces more lasting ones. Why? Because in an unfamiliar environment, autopilot cannot find its usual track. And the experience becomes part of who you are, not something you have to try to remember.
When you lead people you don’t know, in a culture that isn’t yours, on a project whose rules aren’t yours, you cannot rely on what you know. You have to be present. Truly present, not professionally present. And in that moment, others see you differently than they do at the office. They see how you react under pressure. How you handle ambiguity. What you do when you don’t know.
Operaatio Juuriharja draws directly on this research. The programme takes place in a small group, in a real environment where achieving real results matters a great deal. And when each member of the group tells you about their experience of you, directly and with warmth, in order to help you, something rare happens.
You can’t explain it away with organisational culture. You can’t say the situation was exceptional or that the feedback is subjective. You were there. They were there. It happened. And everyone’s experience is different.
Over the years, I have heard many leaders describe that moment. Some participants describe it calmly, others are still a little moved years later. What they share is that they all knew: this was real. At last, someone wanted to help them enough to tell them what they saw. Not an insult, not a judgement, but a feeling and its effects, things that had never been said out loud before. A new understanding emerges of why things have turned out the way they have. There is something liberating about finally hearing it. And the group helps you move forward, towards something new.
When were you last in a situation where you didn’t know in advance how it would go? Where experience didn’t save you, and you had to face something new, within yourself?
Is your answer “I can’t remember”?