The faster you go, the more this matters!
Last month, the Grand Prix came to St. Pete.
From our house, a mile away, we could hear the buzz of the engines tearing through the city—and it sparked a realization I’ve been circling for years:
🏎️
Speed doesn’t cause failure.
It exposes the reasons for failure.
It’s a magnifying glass.
The faster you go, the more clearly you see what’s already there.
Picture a car:
At 30 mph, a tiny flaw—a slightly misaligned wheel, a loose bolt, worn-out brakes—doesn’t seem like a problem. And will likely go unnoticed.
At 120 mph? That same flaw can cause the whole system to fall apart.
High speed doesn’t create new issues—it just makes the existing ones impossible to ignore.
Teams work the same way.
When your company’s moving fast—scaling hard, chasing big targets, stretching your people—what once felt like small issues, all the tiny flaws in communication, trust, and decision-making get exposed.
Suddenly:
• Decisions slow down. Or stall.
• Micromanagement creeps in.
• Overwhelm —or burnout— increases.
• Ownership fades.
And here’s the thing: most leaders try to solve it by adding more—more meetings, more systems, more oversight… or God help me, another “task force.”
But speed doesn’t come from more systems. More to do’s.
It comes from trust. It comes from connection. It comes from clarity.
Let me tell you a quick story…
A few years ago, I thought I’d made a discovery.
After working with leaders across the world, teaching BRAVE®, and studying what actually breaks teams as they scale, I saw a pattern:
Companies, even the ones who start with great culture—especially those—begin to unravel when they try to grow quickly.
It seemed directly tied to the period described in Geoffrey Moore’s classic “Crossing the Chasm.” 📈
Moore says that when companies are trying grow and go from appealing to early adopters to mainstream markets, they have to change how they talk about themselves—or they’ll fail.
If you’ve seen my friend and colleague, Simon Sinek’s famous TEDx talk “How Great Leaders Inspire Action”— the one where he drew The Golden Circle, “people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it”—it’s actually rooted in Geoffrey Moore’s same insight about The Law of Diffusion of Innovation. 🎯
And… I saw something deeper.
That same moment in a company’s lifecycle—when they try to leap across the chasm—when size and speed become the priorities, when uncertainty and change become the norm, is when culture starts to crack.
It’s not because they stop caring about their people, quite the contrary. They think they’re doing a great job culture-wise. And on the outside, it seems like they are.
The unraveling happens because there are already small cracks beneath the surface— the loose bolt, the slight misalignment— that are still unknown and unseen. And then they hit the gas pedal.
They start going faster and faster.
Growing, growing, growing.
Speed is a magnifier. An amplifier.
And then at a certain velocity, those otherwise unknown and unseen issues start to matter WAY more…
And the wheels fall off. 🙈
Their mistake?
No one looked beneath the hood to diagnose if their engine —their people, their culture—could withstand the speed. And the pressure that comes with it.
I called this moment The Culture Chasm.
I thought I was so smart 😂
I thought I coined a term, then I googled it.
Turns out, a few other people had used the same term (even though I had notebooks filled with it). Oh well, so much for being original.
So I kept iterating on my theory…
Turns out, there was another term I kept repeating…
When you try to cross the chasm—when you’re hitting the gas, hard—I’d see well-meaning leaders, who’d established beautiful mission-driven cultures, leading their team right off the cliff…
What do I mean?
I’d always get this silly visual in my head of cartoon penguins gathering at the edge of a cliff and then as more and more join, it pushes the first one off the cliff, and then they proceed to fall off like dominoes. At first one by one, then all at once. 🤷🏼♀️🐧
But that was it: The Culture Cliff®
Because if you don’t know how to lead at speed, you don’t just stumble around—you end up (inadvertently) marching your people off a cliff and thinking you’re leading.
There they go…
One broken conversation at a time.
This is why I’m so obsessed with what we’ve built with BRAVE®.
What is BRAVE®?
It’s not a motivational talk.
It’s not theory.
It’s a science-backed, high-performance framework for fast-growing teams that need to move faster, with less friction—and more impact.
Yes, you know what BRAVE® is, I know.
But this is why when we started running online workshops with Simon Sinek and his team during COVID, we blew up (in the best way🥳). We reached teams across the world, over night. At a time when everyone was needing to hit the gas in some way or another.
Because if we all need anything, we need a roadmap to follow when stress is high, when we need to move fast AND get the most out of our interactions with others.
Before BRAVE® things were too often mutually exclusive.
Its why inside our workshops and longer term programs, your team will:
• Get a system to handle conflict and pressure without slowing down
• Learn how to build trust that fuels velocity—not just “good vibes”
• Shift from bottlenecked decisions to team-driven ownership
• Move from “reactive” to “relentless momentum”
💪This is how you go from good intention to positive impact.
👏 This is how you grow and scale without breaking your team.
🏎️ This is how you can hit the gas and know—for sure—that your engine (your people, your culture) can handle it.
🏁 Learning BRAVE® is what it looks like to check “beneath the hood” before you gun it.
But don’t just listen to me, one company said BRAVE® was the difference between success and failure—because the framework them a way to stop wasting time on the human friction they didn’t know how to fix.
Another leader said they saw an increase in productivity of 30% almost immediately and anticipated more to come.
Another said they wished they’d spent 90 minutes with me before COVID hit, because if they had, their company would be in a very different (better) spot than where they find themselves now (scrambling and rebuilding trust after some pretty big losses).
🪤 The Trap
The biggest problem that I see, the trap, is that because those cracks and fissures in your culture are largely unseen at the outset of a high growth cycle, leaders ASSUME they’re ok. (And we all know the saying about what happens when we assume… right?).
I wish I never had to hear another leader say, “we can’t take the time right now, we’re moving too fast.” 🙄 Because I know what their future will look like.
How to not fall into the trap
So, here’s what I want you to think about to protect your hard work, inspiring mission and the people in your charge (not to mention your OKRs):
Are there even tiny hiccups in your culture right now?
Are you trained to spot them?
*** Note: I’m making a diagnostic tool for that, because my hunch is that you’re probably not trained to spot them (nor should you be, that’s another full time job, vocation, devotion— trust me, I’ve spent my life studying people to know this stuff. Thanks, Dad).***
In case you’re curious, here are just a couple of those hiccups to look for. And yes, they seem pretty benign, but they snowball quickly. Trust me…
Meeting etiquette: Do people come to meetings late? And then (later in the cycle) do they explode into the zoom room like a bomb was dropped— with all the frenetic energy and “reasons” for being behind? 😵💫
Busy as a status symbol: Do people make a point to talk about how much they work or how they work weekends? Usually because there was a fire drill of some sort or (later in the cycle) because “that’s just what we do here”? PS this counts even if your leaders are applauding the team who “really came together” when it was all hands on deck, again. 🙅🏼♀️
Silent but deadly: Do you hear “no” a lot? To that next project, idea, deadline, proposed pivot or to taking on additional work? If you don’t hear “no”, do meetings consist of people restating the same thing in 24+ different ways? Or do you think that silence means there are no cracks beneath the surface and that all is 🌈 great?
Shoot me your answers to these questions and let’s see how you do!
Spoiler alert: depending on how you answered what, my sense is that even from those three, I’ll be able to tell where you’re at in The Culture Cliff® lifecycle. (This might be the time to lock in that BRAVE® workshop you’ve been thinking about getting on the calendar… just saying💁🏼♀️).
🛑 Hit the brakes, just for a sec
So if you’re about to file this newsletter before taking an action, I want you to stop for a moment and think:
If you’re already moving fast, how useful and important might it be so share this with someone? Not as a critique, but as a way to say, “I care so much about this team and our mission that I want to look under the hood, before we hit the gas again.”
If you want to be part of the solution, you must take an action.
If you see something, say something.
If you’re ok remaining part of the silent-but-deadly problem, sure hit the x and pretend you never read this. I won’t tell.
But if you’ve made it this far, what I’ve learned about people like us is that you’re where you are because mediocre doesn’t appeal to you.
You stand for something greater.
You take pride in being the kind of person who stands up for what they believe in, leads, no matter the chaos happening around you.
And what I’m learning right now is that, if you’re a parent — being this type of role model feels even more essential. We need a new generation of action takers. So…
Don’t fall asleep at the wheel.
And don’t let others stay asleep.
Don’t assume everything is running as smoothly as you think.
Why not check beneath the hood?
What are you afraid of finding? 🤔
Let’s get your team aligned and operating like the well-oiled machine it’s meant to be.
Let’s be BRAVE together.
I’ll be here when you’re ready.
🏁 Start your engines,
Elisabeth