Staying curious

Every now and then, as a leader or a coach, we look up and the road ahead seems clear, the destination obvious, the path charted. And then Jim Ferrell comes along with You and We and gently asks us to look again. Not harder, wider.

We like to imagine work as a collection of capable individuals doing their best within their neatly defined boxes on the org charts. Dots and lines, roles and responsibilities. But Ferrell invites us to step back from the diagram and ask what actually lives between those dots. What’s going on unseen beneath the surface?

The truth he presents is as unsettling as it is freeing – performance doesn’t sit inside people. It lives in the relational space between them. That brilliant space full of synthesis and antithesis, culture and systems, personality and bias, and so much more.  

For many of us who’ve spent years navigating leadership conversations, this lands like discovering that the map we’ve been using shows only the coastline, not the depths. We’ve been scanning for individual performance, individual behaviour, individual decisions—spotlighting fragments of the whole like a searchlight catching the corner of a long‑forgotten wreck. We need to pan wider, scan a little further.

As coaches, we like to believe we help others find their own answers—and most of the time, we do. But Ferrell reminds us that we are never a blank slate in the room. Our assumptions, our desires, even our quiet wish for our client to find their way—they cast subtle shadows. The relational space includes us too.

In a similar vein, the art critic John Berger once wrote…

We never look at just one thing. We are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves. 

That’s the heart of Ferrell’s model – leadership is relational, not individualistic. He gives us tools to explore that relational field—behaviour, attitude, structure, community—but more importantly, he encourages us to stay on the open road of curiosity a little longer. To resist the comfort of early answers. To trust that something deeper may be waiting just beyond the obvious.

There’s humility in this. A willingness to admit that our own perspectives aren’t the destination, just another part of the terrain.

American business books love a story, and one of the charms of You and We is that it doesn’t lecture. It asks us to walk with our clients—not to usher them towards the solution that feels right to us, but to hold the space long enough for something truer to emerge. Something that might shake our worldview as much as theirs.

When we do that—when we stay open, present, and free of choreography—the work becomes what coaching at its best always is – a shared discovery. A reminder that leadership, like life, has no fixed path at all.

Just an open road.

Curiouser and curiouser.

Julian

I help leaders find their voice and vision in transition

www.orangecairns.com