Every leader is quietly passing an addiction on to their team — the addiction to urgency. Jennifer Recla — leadership coach who's worked with hundreds of leaders across nonprofits, mission-driven organizations, and large financial institutions — argues that most of what feels like a "busy" workday isn't a workload problem at all. It's a mindset problem. And most leaders have no idea how much of the chaos in their teams they're personally creating.

Jennifer has spent her career coaching leaders across nonprofits, smaller organizations, and larger institutions to build sustainable schedules, healthier team dynamics, and clearer communication. Her clients typically come to her exhausted — working nights and weekends, drowning in emails, without time to think about strategy or develop the people around them. She's built diagnostic tools like the urgency mindset index to help leaders see where they land on the spectrum and how to move.

In this conversation, Jennifer unpacks why the single behavior driving organizational chaos isn't a behavior at all — it's a mindset. She walks through the urgency mindset spectrum (low urgency → strong urgency → urgency addiction), why emails and notifications are the biggest hidden time suck, and why a healthy leader has to consciously leave some work for others to pick up. She reframes managing up as a two-way skill — how helping your leader uncover what they actually mean strengthens trust rather than eroding it, and why doing it too often signals a bigger problem. She shares what mission-driven organizations get right about values and relationships that bigger companies quietly abandon. She closes on AI: why it won't replace people, why leaders now need to ramp up their people skills instead of scaling them down, and the three things every leader who creates clarity actually does — ending with the four questions every leader should ask their team this week.

📥 Download the Coordination Tax Index 2026: https://www.in-parallel.com/coordination-tax/#report

CHAPTERS

[00:00] Cold open + intro
[00:58] Why leaders create chaos — mindset, not behavior
[01:27] The urgency mindset — what it actually looks like
[02:36] The first diagnostic — audit your workload
[04:22] Why emails and notifications are the biggest time suck
[06:31] The urgency mindset index — where do you land?
[08:04] Side effects when the team can't read the leader
[10:07] Managing up as a two-way skill
[12:58] What smaller and mission-driven organizations get right
[16:38] AI won't replace people — why you need MORE people skills now
[17:55] Three things a leader who creates clarity does
[19:19] The four questions to ask your team this week

Guest & show links:

Jennifer Recla on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenniferrecla/
Website: https://www.jenrecla.com/
In Parallel: https://www.in-parallel.com
Coordination Tax Index 2026: https://www.in-parallel.com/coordination-tax/#report

Most organizations run on a fiction — that job descriptions describe jobs, that OKRs measure value, that personality tests reveal something real. Barry Wolfe — HR consultant and author of It's All in Your Head — argues that HR is the last line of defense against the chaos this creates, and that the actual foundation of a well-run company is one document, under 300 words, that answers two questions almost nobody bothers to ask.

Barry has spent decades working with HR leaders and business owners to help them build organizations where every role has a clear connection to the value the business creates. His book It's All in Your Head: Why Psychology Doesn't Help Your Employees Deliver Value — and What Can is the culmination of a two-year deep dive into the science, and often the pseudo-science, behind the tools HR uses every day. He is the creator of the value-centric leadership framework and runs Argos HR.

In this conversation, Barry unpacks why HR is the last line of defense against organizational chaos, why OKRs quietly stop at "deliverables" instead of value, and why every role in a company should have 3-5 clear value outcomes — or be reconsidered entirely. He walks through the surprising history of the DISC personality test (invented by William Moulton Marston, the Harvard psychologist who also created Wonder Woman) and explains why business owners buy pseudo-science: they're not really paying for the tests, they're paying for easy answers to hard questions. He introduces the Same Page — a document of fewer than 300 words that should be readable by a machine operator and a CEO alike, and should be the basis of everything the organization does. He closes on AI: why he's sceptical of the "killer robots" narrative, why LLMs cannot write your same page for you, and the one question every leader should reflect on this week.

CHAPTERS

[00:00] Cold open + intro
[01:08] HR as the last line of defense against chaos
[04:00] The first signs HR isn't doing its job
[05:34] Why OKRs stop short of actual value
[08:03] The two questions every leader must answer
[10:06] Why every role needs 3-5 value outcomes
[14:10] The strange history of the DISC test (and Wonder Woman)
[17:20] Why business owners keep buying pseudo-science
[18:09] The Same Page — a 300-word document that runs everything
[21:13] Whether AI will actually replace jobs
[23:16] Why AI can't tell you what your same page is
[29:35] The one reflection every leader should do this week

Guest & show links:

Barry Wolfe on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/barryrwolfe/
It's All in Your Head on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Its-All-Your-Head-Psychology-ebook/dp/B0FD84SNGG
Argos HR: https://www.argoshr.com/
In Parallel: https://www.in-parallel.com
Coordination Tax Index 2026: https://www.in-parallel.com/coordination-tax/#report

Every disruption looks like a peace-time problem until the swordsman meets the bullet. Alberto Torres — former Nokia executive, ex-McKinsey partner, and author of The Z Curve — sat inside one of the most famous corporate collapses of the last two decades. In this conversation he walks through what actually happened at Nokia, why great peace-time leaders quietly fail in war-time, and what every company facing AI right now should learn from the companies that got disruption right (and the ones that didn't).

Alberto has spent his career at the sharp end of disruption. He joined Nokia in 2009 as part of the leadership team trying to turn the ship around, ran Vertu (Nokia's luxury phone business) and the accessories group before that, and later held roles at Opera, Bang & Olufsen, and Adobe, where he now works. Before Nokia he was a partner at McKinsey. His book The Z Curve was written to give managers facing disruption today — especially around AI — a more aggressive playbook for surviving it.

In this conversation, Alberto unpacks why Stephen Elop wasn't the only culprit in Nokia's collapse, why empowerment is the right leadership model in peace-time and the wrong one in disruption, why "you don't get radical action by averaging opinions," and why the people who vote for continuity are always right — until they're not. He walks through his S-curve/Z-curve framework for reading a disruption in real time, the sword-vs-bullet metaphor at the heart of the book, and the two companies (Adobe and Netflix) that got self-disruption right by cannibalising their own successful business. He closes on AI: why he thinks it's the next internet-scale disruption, why "the winners will be picked in the next few years," and the one thing every leader should do this week if they suspect their company is at the start of a Z-curve.

📥 Download the Coordination Tax Index 2026: https://www.in-parallel.com/coordination-tax/#report

CHAPTERS

[00:00] Cold open + intro
[01:26] Stephen Elop wasn't the only culprit — an insider view of Nokia's collapse
[04:57] Why organizations live in split reality
[07:12] The swordsman and the bullet
[10:16] Peace-time leadership vs war-time leadership
[10:57] 400 beautiful hardware models — and no software strategy
[13:22] Joining Nokia in 2009
[16:15] The S-curve theory and why we couldn't see it coming
[19:55] Continuity voters, fatalists, and the muddled middle
[25:36] Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo — the peace-time CEO
[26:40] "You don't get radical action by averaging opinions"
[27:00] The Z-curve — the ignored half of the S-curve
[34:24] The Dreams framework — how Adobe transformed
[38:15] Netflix cannibalising itself — how to disrupt yourself
[40:07] AI is the next Nokia moment
[46:02] What to do this week if you're facing disruption

Guest & show links:

Alberto Torres on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/torresalberto/
The Z Curve on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Z-Curve-Alberto-Torres/dp/1917391676

In Parallel: https://www.in-parallel.com
Coordination Tax Index 2026: https://www.in-parallel.com/coordination-tax/#report

Every organization over 20 people has the same instinct: when things get harder, add layers, add meetings, add controls. Olivia Montgomery — principal analyst at Data Frame and former Gartner researcher — argues that every layer up the org chart actually knows less about what's really going on, not more. And the fix isn't more visibility for leadership. It's pushing decisions down two or three levels, to an uncomfortable place.

Olivia has spent more than a decade researching how project management, PMOs, and organizational design actually work — first at Gartner, now at Data Frame. Her research has consistently shown that formal PMOs improve project delivery and success, that emotional intelligence in project leaders correlates with better outcomes, and that most "coordination fixes" companies deploy are quietly making things worse.

In this conversation, Olivia unpacks why leadership's perception of clarity is almost always wrong, what the Monday-morning test looks like for teams that are actually clear on what they own, why mixing meeting types (status vs. brainstorm vs. decision) is one of the most common quiet destroyers of time, and the simple first test to apply to any meeting or process: is this alleviating uncertainty? She walks through her Gartner-era research on why PMOs work, why emotional intelligence in project leaders isn't a soft skill but a measurable performance driver, and why AI tools built for engagement are silently eating the productivity gains their vendors promise. She closes on the one thing every leader should do this week: identify the decisions that require the most meetings, and ask honestly why the team doing the work can't make them.

📥 Download the Coordination Tax Index 2026: https://www.in-parallel.com/coordination-tax/#report

CHAPTERS

[00:00] Cold open + intro
[01:08] Meetings and tools aren't the problem — misuse is
[02:26] Nokia — every layer up knew less
[04:19] Push decisions down two or three levels
[05:59] The Monday-morning clarity test
[07:25] Stop mixing meeting types
[11:32] The first test: is this alleviating uncertainty?
[13:37] Why PMOs actually work — the Gartner research
[18:41] Emotional intelligence in project leaders — 10 years of data
[22:57] Why a strict KPI focus creates dishonesty
[25:40] AI tools are designed to keep you talking
[30:55] Companies need a conscious AI vision, not a vendor-driven one
[32:23] "You built a tool for yourself" — the product-research problem
[35:21] Closing advice — the one thing to do this week

Guest & show links:

Olivia Montgomery on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/olivia-montgomery/
Data Frame: https://dataframe.consulting/
In Parallel: https://www.in-parallel.com — we build the shared context layer for teams. Try our AI notetaker for free.

Every founder hits the moment when execution stops running through their brain. The systems that got them here don't work anymore, but the founder is still the bottleneck. Craig Denison — head of growth at The Table Group (Patrick Lencioni's firm) and founder of Green Thumb Consulting — walks through what actually breaks in the "getting organized" stage, and why 99% of the time, the founder is the one creating the dysfunction they're trying to fix.

Craig runs growth for Patrick Lencioni and the Table Group, co-owns a floral design business with his wife, and through Green Thumb Consulting helps founders through the transition William Bridges called getting organized — the stage after you've launched a venture but before you've built an institution. Before consulting, Craig ran a 50-person business as CEO and lived the shift he now walks his clients through.

In this conversation, Craig unpacks why founders create the very dysfunction they blame their teams for, how team cohesion (in Lencioni's 5-dysfunctions frame) is the actual foundation execution sits on, and why honesty is a shortcut to almost every problem teams try to solve with more infrastructure. He walks through his own hardest founder moment — realizing everyone on his executive team was better at their function than he was, and having to grieve the loss of being "the rock star" — and how that reframe from how good am I to how effective are these people around me changed the whole job. He closes on the two practices every founder should run: fighting about what's right for the company rather than who's right, and the last-ten-minutes-of-the-meeting discipline that fixes most commitment and accountability failures.

📥 Download the Coordination Tax Index 2026: https://www.in-parallel.com/coordination-tax/#report

CHAPTERS

[00:00] Cold open + intro
[00:45] The founder-as-bottleneck moment
[02:34] What "getting organized" actually means
[05:07] Monday morning when the founder isn't essential
[06:30] Team cohesion and the five dysfunctions
[09:15] Why honesty saves you from building unnecessary infrastructure
[12:45] "I don't get to be the rock star anymore" — the founder's identity shift
[15:39] Diagnostics — when it's time to get organized
[18:06] Productive conflict — fighting about what's right, not who's right
[23:00] Why committed C-level players beat uncommitted A+ players
[25:51] 99% of the time, the founder is the problem
[27:25] The last-ten-minutes-of-the-meeting discipline

Guest & show links:

Craig Denison on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/craigdenison/
Green Thumb Consulting: https://www.greenthumb.consulting/
The Table Group (Patrick Lencioni): https://www.tablegroup.com
Coordination Tax Index 2026: https://www.in-parallel.com/coordination-tax/#report

Companies are spending more on training than ever. So why does execution keep getting worse?

Dr. Christy Vanorsdale — founder of Vanorsdale Learning Lab, cognitive multimedia learning researcher, and fractional Chief Learning Officer — explains why L&D keeps solving the wrong problems, and what happens when you treat it as a strategic partner instead of an order taker.

Christy has spent 15 years dragging L&D out of order-taker mode and into being a strategic partner for business. She holds a doctorate in cognitive multimedia learning and today runs Vanorsdale Learning Lab, working with mid-market scaleups and B2C training companies to redesign their learning ecosystems from the ground up.

In this conversation, Christy walks through why most L&D teams get treated as content-makers rather than strategic partners — and why that misdiagnosis quietly costs companies. She unpacks the "order taker" problem, the trap of promoting subject-matter experts into training roles when they lack a background in how people actually learn, why working memory is limited in space AND time (and why the "make it TikTok-length" fallacy is wrong), how to measure L&D effectiveness through business goals rather than completion rates, and the true story of the IT specialists who were "failing at product knowledge" — until she went and asked them, and it turned out the real problem was they'd never been trained on the customers on the other end of the phone. She closes on the discovery process every L&D leader should run before designing a single module.

📥 Download the Coordination Tax Index 2026: https://www.in-parallel.com/coordination-tax/#report

CHAPTERS

[00:00] Cold open + intro
[00:57] The "order taker" problem
[03:21] The subject-matter expert trap
[08:44] Working memory — limited in space and time
[13:21] The TikTok fallacy
[16:02] Why L&D isn't at the strategy table
[19:59] L&D as the translator across organizational silos
[20:47] When an emerging scaleup should engage L&D
[22:22] How to actually measure L&D working
[26:00] The IT specialists story — a real misdiagnosis
[29:55] The discovery process every L&D leader should run

Guest & show links:

Dr. Christy Vanorsdale on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christievanorsdale-learning/
Vanorsdale Learning Lab: https://www.vanorsdalelearninglab.com/services
Coordination Tax Index 2026: https://www.in-parallel.com/coordination-tax/#report

How much of your workweek is actually work?

In this special solo episode of The Coordination Tax, Kristian Luoma — co-founder of In Parallel — walks through the newly published Coordination Tax Index 2026: the first quantitative measure of how much of a modern manager's week actually goes to managing the work, versus managing the work about the work. The Index reads 31 out of 100 — meaning nearly a third of management capacity is consumed by coordination overhead before any real work happens.

Kristian is the co-founder of In Parallel and co-author, with Markku Mäkeläinen, of the Coordination Tax Index 2026. The report surveyed 247 managers across five countries — the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and Germany — and nine industries. It moves past how people feel about meetings and actually measures where the hours go.

In this episode, Kristian walks through the headline: 16.5 hours a week per manager lost to coordination overhead — roughly two full working days. The perception gap that hides those hours — managers self-report losing 21% of the week, but when they itemise the hours, it's actually 41%. Where the time goes: status meetings, re-explaining context to someone who already had it, and hunting for decisions that already exist somewhere. Why tool count is the strongest structural multiplier — from 13 hours a week at 1–3 tools to 32 hours at 10+. Why the heaviest AI users are carrying more coordination load than non-users, not less. And what the data rules out about how to fix it: you cannot train your way out, you cannot buy your way out with another system of record, and you cannot prompt your way out.

📥 Download the Coordination Tax Index 2026: https://www.in-parallel.com/coordination-tax/#report

CHAPTERS

[00:00] Intro — 31 out of 100
[01:54] Why we built the Index
[03:50] Where the 16.5 hours actually go
[05:35] The perception gap — and the dark matter of the P&L
[06:47] Why it's structural, not behavioural
[07:56] Tool count — the strongest multiplier
[09:21] The AI paradox — heaviest users pay the most
[11:22] The shared-context dividend
[12:52] What managers would do with the time back
[13:46] Three things the data rules out
[15:26] What to do on Monday

Host: Kristian Luoma (In Parallel)

Show links:

Coordination Tax Index 2026: https://www.in-parallel.com/coordination-tax/#report

Why does a 10× productivity gain for the individual translate into only a 1.7× gain for the organization?

Hosanna Ouellette and Nora Bereczkei ran the operating model rebuild inside Spotify. They explain why autonomy stopped scaling, how they stopped shipping the org chart to users, and why agents break the purposeful ambiguity every operating model quietly relies on.

Nora has built the delivery backbone inside Spotify, the BBC and now at Gusto. Hosanna spent her career moving ideas through one of the largest matrix firms on the planet, and today deploys autonomous agents into live commercial workflows. Together they led the rebuild of Spotify's product operating system — and lived through what the coordination tax actually costs when hundreds of squads try to ship one unified experience to millions of users.

📥 Download the Coordination Tax Index 2026: https://www.in-parallel.com/coordination-tax/#report

CHAPTERS

[00:00] Cold open + intro
[01:31] What "operating system" actually means to Hosanna and Nora
[04:49] Don't ship your org chart to the user
[08:49] Horizontals vs verticals — the tension every scaling org faces
[11:13] The Airbnb story — low to high coordination tax, on purpose
[14:12] The Spotify model — culture, not structure, was the problem
[18:21] Autonomy at scale — when dependencies grow geometrically
[20:36] The Porsche stopped at a red light — why team velocity is the wrong metric
[23:19] Hard APIs between teams — getting systems of record in sync
[33:12] Why agents can't work with the purposeful ambiguity operating models rely on
[35:35] "Everyone arrives with 26 rocket ships"
[36:41] Productivity era vs outcome era for agents
[39:39] 10× for the individual, 1.7× for the organization
[40:04] The human ceiling on organizational complexity is gone
[46:27] Closing advice — "you can do anything, but you cannot do everything"

Guest & show links:

Hosanna Ouellette on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hosanna-ouellette/
Nora Bereczkei on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/norabereczkei/
Coordination Tax Index 2026: https://www.in-parallel.com/coordination-tax/#report

Why are the managers using AI the most also carrying the highest coordination load?

Robert E. Siegel — partner at XSeed Capital, lecturer at Stanford Graduate School of Business, and author of The Systems Leader — explains the hidden cost of coordination, why context has become a leader's most valuable asset, and what every CEO should rethink on Monday morning.

Robert has spent his career at the intersection of Silicon Valley and Stanford. He worked on Andy Grove's research team for Only the Paranoid Survive at Intel, is now a partner at XSeed Capital, and teaches at Stanford Graduate School of Business, where his Systems Leadership course became the foundation for his latest book, The Systems Leader. He is currently working on a new book revisiting Michael Porter's The Competitive Advantage of Nations for a world where business and government are becoming increasingly intertwined.

In this conversation, Robert reacts to In Parallel's Coordination Tax Index — which found that managers lose 16.5 hours every week to coordination overhead and that the heaviest AI users carry the greatest coordination burden. He explains why truth equals facts plus context, explores the five cross-pressures every modern leader must hold at once, discusses what he calls "unserious behaviours in a serious world," and ends with a practical challenge: audit your own calendar, because your team is watching what you actually prioritize.

📥 Download the Coordination Tax Index 2026: https://www.in-parallel.com/coordination-tax/#report

CHAPTERS

[00:00] Cold open + intro
[00:42] Robert on Andy Grove and Only the Paranoid Survive
[01:09] Why we need a different thesis than 1996 — constant crisis, not one-time inflection
[03:03] The five cross-pressures + the Kathy Mazzarella story
[05:33] Grace under fire — highest highs and lowest lows in the same career
[07:57] "Unserious behaviours in a serious world" — the Zuckerberg vs Musk cage match
[10:15] The Coordination Tax Index — 16.5 hours a week per manager
[11:04] Truth = facts + context — the leader's real job
[13:16] Why AI users are carrying more coordination load, not less
[15:26] Signal from noise — the phone-notifications analogy
[22:40] Monday-morning move: audit your own calendar
[24:56] Your teams are watching where you spend your time
[26:47] The next book — revisiting The Competitive Advantage of Nations

Guest & show links:

Robert on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertesiegel/
Book (The Systems Leader): https://www.robertesiegel.com/the-systems-leader
Coordination Tax Index 2026: https://www.in-parallel.com/coordination-tax/#report

In this conversation, Jeroen Kraaijenbrink unpacks why CEOs are usually the last to know — how information travels sideways through rumors and gossip but rarely up the org chart, because speaking up vertically comes with real career risk. He shares the finding that only about 1% of employees feel confident voicing concerns in crucial moments, and tells the story of a hundred-year-old company where the CEO stared at two green dashboard numbers while the top thirty managers underneath him described a "sick company," a "sick culture," and "the black period in history." He walks through PACE — Purpose, Awareness, Connection, Energy — one pillar at a time, tells the story of the confidential email a CEO forwarded to the person it was about, and closes on the single uncomfortable conversation every leader has to have first: the one with themselves.

Jeroen Kraaijenbrink is a strategy author, teacher, and independent consultant with more than twenty years in the field — writing, teaching, and working directly with the executive teams trying to actually make their strategies work. His current argument, after all of it, is that most companies don't have a strategy problem at all. They have an honesty problem. And nobody in the building is willing to name it out loud. He is the author of several books, including The One Hour Strategy, and he has developed a diagnostic framework called PACE — Purpose, Awareness, Connection, Energy — to check whether the human conditions for honesty are actually in place before a company writes another plan.

CHAPTERS

[00:00] Cold open — Jeroen on the "honesty problem"
[01:01] Why CEOs are the last to know — rumors travel sideways, not up
[01:32] The truth doesn't travel vertically
[02:23] Strategy isn't strategy — it's analysis, and 100 frameworks in a textbook
[04:28] "Brains at the top, hands at the bottom" — where that idea comes from
[05:47] The One Hour Strategy — everyone in a company owning their piece
[06:51] 50–90% of strategy execution fails, and only 13% of workers engaged
[07:56] Only 1% feel confident voicing concerns in crucial moments
[09:11] Coordination is part of the problem — and part of the solution
[10:13] The dashboard CEO vs. the sick company — a hundred-year-old company in denial
[11:55] Why history gets into the DNA — new leaders can't always break the past
[13:15] The red flags — the first three seconds on Teams, and the forwarded confidential email
[14:56] PACE — Purpose, Awareness, Connection, Energy
[15:47] Purpose: why people only speak up if they care about the cause
[16:36] Awareness: knowing your own blind spots and biases
[17:00] Connection: no psychological safety, no honesty
[17:51] Energy: fear mode, ego, and the split between work and home
[19:57] The one uncomfortable conversation a leader needs to have — with themselves
[22:37] "Just like in airplanes" — start with yourself, then help the rest
[24:11] Be the drop in the water — the ripple effect

Guest: Jeroen Kraaijenbrink · Host: Kristian Luoma (In Parallel)

GUEST & SHOW LINKS

Jeroen on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeroenkraaijenbrink/
Jeroen's website: https://www.jeroenkraaijenbrink.com/