We Need Expedition Leaders, Not Tour Guides

Have you seen Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum? What an absolute gem of a place. Beautiful art.

Like Henry David Sleeper’s unforgettable mosaic. He made it from glass shards collected by an ambulance driver after a WWI bombing. Something broken and devastating transformed into a forever piece of art.

Also, incredible tour guides. Ours, Linda, was so super knowledgeable. She knows the collection inside and out. Her certainty was magnetic. She knew exactly where we were going and why. Our job was simple: follow, absorb, appreciate.

As she led and we followed, it occurred to me that this is the brand of leadership required inside a museum. For sharing the static past. Teaching history. Not making it.

But the workplace? It calls for something different. Because we’re looking ahead — not behind. Yet too many leaders today are striving to embody the same certainty and authority Linda carried with her.

But we don’t need tour guides. We need expedition leaders.

We’re wading through a reality that is anything but static. Dynamism is raging. Global complexity that only continues to ramp up. Technology that’s evolving faster than we can learn it. We’re in uncharted waters. There’s no map.

This is an age of exploration.

We need to let go of the belief that “successful” leadership is defined by knowing and assuring and getting it right the first time.

Tour-guide leadership is what most of us were taught. We’ve been rewarded for having the answer and delivering it with certainty.

And it sneaks in. In small moments we barely notice.

When you feel pressure to explain what’s happening before you actually understand it.

When silence makes you uncomfortable, so you fill it.

When your credibility feels tied to sounding certain rather than asking a better question.

That’s tour-guide leadership.

Expedition leadership is walking into a meeting with a perspective but asking the team what they’re seeing first. It’s wanting the full picture before anchoring the room.

It’s making decisions with incomplete information, and being explicit about it. “Here’s what we’re betting on. Here’s what could prove us wrong. Here’s when we’ll check.”

It’s attending to friction. Noting when something feels slow or stuck, and asking for ideas around how to infuse it with ease and simplicity without diminishing the result.

It’s treating an operating model as something to keep adjusting. Meeting cadences, planning cycles, decision-making. Nothing is sacred — all is up for revision along the way.

Linda was great at her job. But her job was to walk people through rooms that haven’t changed in a hundred years.

You’re not leading through a museum. You’re leading through terrain that shifts while you’re standing on it.

The Gardner Museum will look the same in ten years.

Your organization won’t.

The market is moving whether you have the map or not. So is your team. The question is whether you’re navigating together or they’re waiting on a tour that’s never going to start.

So happy exploring!