Primal Intelligence: You Are Smarter Than You Know by Angus Fletcher

Stories evolved to help the brain react intelligently to the unexpected. Angus suggests to start your story in the middle. This is something that authors like Homer and Shakespeare have done. Starting with an unexpected middle stirs curiosity. It helps your audience imagine a future. Try to use archetypes that break the rules. This will make them exceptional. Stories that contain riddles stimulate curiosity and suspense.
Prompt your audience to wonder why. Then explain why, answering their questions for them. Then let them imagine what if. The final ingredient is trust. Trust comes from being candid. Commit to sharing the full and honest story of your life. You build trust with honesty. People can detect a lack of authenticity, which will destroy trust. Hopefully you feel interpersonal warmth, also called love. Don’t quit being transparent.

The rule here is unleash the rookie. There is a paradox of expertise. Experts are likely to draw on what they know when things change, even when what they know no longer applies. For the rookie, everything is new, so they don’t misapply information they never learned. Whatever the rookie mucks up, you can un-muck. This is like sending medical students to hospital wards where they deal with real patients rather than textbooks.
Empower individuals in your control by letting them go. (Doug: My mantra is “hire good people, get out of their way, and support them when they need it.” As a US Army reservist working two weeks a year in hospital labs, I was given most of the non routine tasks. While I looked up the procedure for an odd ball test, the rest of the crew could efficiently do the routine work. As a district computer director, I hired student programmers. Whenever we got a new piece of gear that someone had to figure out, I gave it to the new kid.)

A problem with education is that it leads you to pass school tests, not life tests. School teaches you how to follow, not how to lead. Three types of leadership are authoritative, telling others what to do; participative, working collaboratively; and transformative, converting people to a shared mission.
Leadership is taking the first step into tomorrow. It’s grabbing opportunities that other people dismiss or don’t see. Managerial training does not produce leaders. Leaders are innovators. They show the way by spotting the exceptional. They are resilient and get stronger with setbacks. They are decision-makers who know when to push and when to pivot. They are communicators and coaches. They have the full primal set of intuition, imagination, emotion, and commonsense. They are self-reliant and do not follow the crowd. Like Wayne Gretzky, they skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it is. Iteration can refine existing systems but it can’t blaze a new trail.