I Was the Busiest Leader in the Building. And the Least Effective.

The 4 shifts that transformed me from firefighter to strategic thinker.

Author

Robert Adams
January 05, 2026

🍽️ Why the Best Leadership Happens Around the Table

Where Food Industry Leaders Are Made – One Habit at a Time!

🎯 Quick – Timely – Impactful Lessons of Leadership

🪑 The Leadership Table Monday, January 05, 2026 | A Student of Leadership

I was drowning in my own effectiveness.

Eighteen-hour days. Inbox at 600+ emails. Triple-booked calendar. I prided myself on being the "go-to" person, the one who could solve any problem, answer any question, handle any crisis. I was indispensable. I was exhausted. And I was completely missing the bigger picture.

One day, my CEO asked me a simple question that shattered my entire leadership identity: "Robert, if you were gone for six months, what strategic initiatives would suffer?"

I opened my mouth to answer and... nothing. Because the honest truth was: none. I wasn't driving strategy. I was responding to tactics. I wasn't thinking three years ahead. I was thinking three hours ahead. I wasn't building systems. I was being the system.

I had confused motion with progress, activity with impact, and firefighting with leadership.

That conversation launched the most humbling, and transformative, year of my career. I had to completely rewire how I thought about my role as a leader. Not just what I did, but how I thought about what needed to be done.

🥖 Opening Bite

Research shows that companies with leaders who demonstrate strong strategic decision-making capabilities are 30% more likely to experience positive revenue growth. Yet Harvard Business Review research reveals that most leaders fail to apply strategic thinking to their decisions due to pressure, urgency, and information overload.

In 2025, strategic thinking has moved from a nice-to-have to the number one skill leaders need. With AI integration, rapid technological change, and constant market disruption, the leaders who thrive aren't the ones working hardest in the details, they're the ones who can zoom out, see patterns, and make decisions that position their organizations for the future.

Strategic thinking isn't about being smarter or having more information. It's about thinking differently. It's the shift from reactive to proactive, from tactical to strategic, from firefighting to fire prevention.

🔥 From the Kitchen

After that CEO conversation, I spent two weeks tracking my time. The results were devastating. 87% of my time was spent on tasks that could have been delegated, automated, or eliminated. Only 13% went to actual strategic work, and even that was squeezed into late nights when I was too tired to think clearly.

I was working incredibly hard to be strategically irrelevant.

The shift I needed to make wasn't about time management. It was about identity transformation. I had to stop seeing my value as "the person who solves all the problems" and start seeing it as "the person who builds the capability for others to solve problems."

That required completely rewiring how I thought about leadership, decisions, and my role in the organization.

🍽️ The Recipe: The 4 Shifts From Reactive to Strategic Thinking

SHIFT 1: FROM FIREFIGHTING TO FIRE PREVENTION (Systems Over Solutions)

Reactive leaders solve problems. Strategic leaders eliminate the conditions that create problems.

I used to measure my value by how many fires I could put out in a day. Customer complaint? I'd handle it personally. Process breakdown? I'd fix it myself. Team conflict? I'd mediate immediately.

The problem? The same fires kept reigniting. Because I was solving symptoms, not addressing root causes. I was valuable in the moment and irrelevant to the future.

The shift required asking different questions.

  • Not "How do I solve this problem?" but "Why does this problem keep happening?"

  • Not "What's the fastest solution?" but "What system would prevent this from recurring?"

I started implementing what I call "The Three-Deep Analysis": When a problem occurred, I'd ask "why" three times to get past the surface issue to the system failure underneath. Then I'd invest time building the process, structure, or capability that would prevent it.

Yes, it took more time upfront. But within six months, 40% of the recurring problems that used to consume my days had simply stopped occurring. The time I invested in prevention freed me to actually think strategically.

SHIFT 2: FROM SHORT-TERM TO LONG-TERM THINKING (Horizon Over Horizon)

Reactive leaders optimize for this quarter. Strategic leaders balance three horizons simultaneously.

I lived in Horizon 1: the immediate, the urgent, the next 90 days. It felt productive. It was measurable. But it was also myopic. I was winning battles while losing the war.

Strategic thinking requires what researchers call "temporal ambidexterity", the ability to hold multiple time horizons in your mind at once:

Horizon 1 (0-12 months): Executing current business. Hitting this quarter's numbers. Solving today's problems. This is necessary, but if it consumes all your thinking, you're being reactive.

Horizon 2 (1-3 years): Building emerging opportunities. Developing new capabilities. Positioning for the next phase. This is where strategic leaders spend most of their mental energy.

Horizon 3 (3-10 years): Exploring future possibilities. Understanding trends that will reshape your industry. Making small bets on what's next. This is visionary thinking.

I started blocking time each week specifically for Horizon 2 and 3 thinking. No execution work allowed. Just strategic exploration: What's changing in our industry? What capabilities will we need in three years that we don't have today? What small bets should we be making now?

This practice changed everything. Because when you think in longer horizons, your decisions in shorter horizons become better. You stop optimizing for the quarter and start optimizing for the future.

SHIFT 3: FROM DATA TO PATTERNS (Insight Over Information)

Reactive leaders collect data. Strategic leaders recognize patterns.

I had access to more data than ever, reports, dashboards, metrics, analytics. But data without pattern recognition is just noise. I was data-rich and insight-poor.

Strategic thinking isn't about having more information. It's about seeing connections others miss. It's pattern recognition at scale.

I started practicing what I call "Strategic Pattern Journaling." Once a week, I'd spend 30 minutes asking:

• What three things did I notice this week that surprised me?
• What patterns am I seeing across different parts of the business?
• What weak signals might indicate future change?
• What assumptions am I making that might be wrong?

This practice trained my brain to look for patterns instead of just processing information. I started noticing connections: Customer complaints in one area correlated with hiring patterns in another. Market trends that looked unrelated were actually part of a larger shift. Seemingly isolated problems were symptoms of the same root cause.

Strategic thinking is largely the practice of noticing what others overlook because you're looking for patterns, not just data points.

SHIFT 4: FROM COMMAND TO ARCHITECTURE (Enabler Over Executor)

Reactive leaders make all the decisions. Strategic leaders build decision-making systems.

This was the hardest shift for me. My identity was wrapped up in being the person with the answers. If people had a question, they came to me. If decisions needed to be made, I made them. I thought that's what leadership was.

But Harvard Business Review research shows that this "hero leadership" model becomes a liability as complexity increases. The organization can only move as fast as the leader can decide. Growth is capped by individual capacity.

Strategic leaders shift from "I have the answer" to "I've built a system where the right answers emerge." They move from executor to architect.

I started applying what I learned from Ray Dalio's concept of "Principles", codifying my decision-making logic so others could apply it. Instead of answering every question, I'd ask: "What principle should guide this decision?" Then we'd document it.

Over time, we built a decision-making architecture: clear principles, defined authorities, frameworks for common decisions, criteria for escalation. My team could make 70% of the decisions that used to come to me, and often made better ones because they had more context.

This freed me to focus on the 30% of decisions that actually required executive judgment and strategic thinking. And it dramatically increased the speed and quality of organizational decision-making.

🥘 From the Line

Eighteen months after making these four shifts, everything changed:

  • Time allocation shifted from 13% strategic to 60% strategic work

  • Organizational decision speed increased by 40% because decisions weren't bottlenecked through me

  • Strategic initiatives actually launched - three major ones that are now core to our business

  • My team's capability grew exponentially because they were solving problems, not just executing my solutions

  • Personal satisfaction increased dramatically because I was finally doing the work only I could do

  • Business results improved not because I worked harder, but because I thought more strategically

🍷 Plated

Here's what I learned about strategic thinking: It's not a personality trait you either have or don't. It's a discipline. A set of practices. A way of allocating your attention and asking better questions.

The irony is that becoming more strategic required me to do less, not more. It meant letting go of the identity of "indispensable problem-solver" and embracing the identity of "architect of systems and capabilities."

In 2025, with constant disruption and accelerating change, organizations don't need leaders who can work harder. They need leaders who can think differently. Who can see around corners. Who can build organizations that are strategically resilient, not just operationally efficient.

That shift begins by asking yourself the same question my CEO asked me: If you were gone for six months, what strategic initiatives would suffer? If the answer is "none," it's time to shift from reactive to strategic.

🧂 Season to Taste

This week's practice: Pick one of the four shifts and focus there for 30 days. Track your time for one week to see where you're actually spending mental energy. Then intentionally reallocate 10% of your time from reactive to strategic work. Small shift, massive impact.

📚 Go Deeper

"Good Strategy Bad Strategy" by Richard Rumelt - The definitive book on what strategy actually is (and isn't)

"Thinking in Bets" by Annie Duke - How to make better decisions when you don't have all the information

"The First 90 Days" by Michael Watkins - Strategic thinking for leaders in transition

🔗 This Week's Newsletters

🎧 LISTEN INSTEAD

Powered by UniPro Foodservice.

Lead Yourself First. Grow from the Inside Out.

🪑 THE LEADERSHIP TABLE, by Robert Adams

Join me at The Table🍴 and gain more Leadership Insights below

Where Thought Leadership comes to life.

🎧 Listen to A Student of Leadership Micro Podcast: 

Food Industry Real Stories.

Reply

or to participate.