Make Time to Think: Leadership Lessons From a Week With Military Strategists

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Hello everyone, welcome back to Still Here, Still Trying. I’m your host, Mike Baker. Look, this show is just for people who are tired but still showing up. People who are trying to stay human in a world that keeps getting louder. People just trying to love better, lead better, create something honest, and just keep going without pretending everything is fine. Hey, this week is going to be a little shorter and a little different because I have been at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and my brain is just full.

I’m late, but I’m here, right? We’re still here, we’re still trying. My brain’s full in a really good way, mostly. And it’s also kind of in that I need a nap, and maybe someone should take my computer away from me for public safety kind of way. But it has been an incredible experience. I have been around military leaders, civilian leaders, professors, strategists, and people who spend a lot of time thinking about national security, complex problems, power, leadership, risk, and the future.

And I would just sit in a lecture or a seminar hearing about global strategy and conflict and China and logistics and just the nature of war, and my brain just kept making connections back home, back to work at heritage, back to healthcare, back to the human first books, to my family, to the question that I keep carrying right now. How do we stay human when the problems around us get bigger, faster, and harder to understand? Before I get into the war college piece, I just want to say thank you.

Um the Human First Books released June 30th, the Kindle releases on the 27th, and the early interest has just been amazing. The messages, the encouragement, just the people asking about the books, the people already connecting with the ideas, and all of that has meant more to me than I know how to say. So thank you very much. These books, as I’ve said before, they truly have pieces of my soul in it. Uh, and I know I’ve said that, but I just I mean it.

I want you to know like this is real, this is me, this is something that I want to share with the world. And, you know, they came out of my actual life. This is from my family and healthcare and leadership and living with ADHD and the women’s health stuff. I mean, it’s just it’s all there. Um, I just I’m gonna make something useful out of what I’ve carried, and I just hope people enjoy them. And more than that, I hope that they help. If one sentence lands at the right time for the right person, that matters to me.

So thank you. Seriously. All right, well, look now back to the war college. I did not come here to bring home a bunch of military language and just kind of paste it into healthcare. Heritage Help does not need to become the army. Uh, my family absolutely does not need me coming home with a command and control model because Kellie would shut that down immediately and correctly. But what I’m bringing home is deeper than that. I’m bringing home reminders about thinking and strategy, problem framing, leadership pressure, and the discipline that it takes to make good decisions when the world is messy.

And that’s what I want to talk about today. This episode is called Make Time to Think. So let’s get into it. Well, one idea that kept hitting me this week is that strategic leadership is not about having the perfect answer in your pocket. A lot of the work is just learning how to think inside complexity without pretending that complexity is smaller than it is. And I know that sounds obvious, but most organizations struggle with it. A problem shows up and we want to make it clean.

Access problems become a scheduling problem, burnout becomes a staffing problem, financial pressure becomes a reimbursement problem, and patient experience becomes a training problem. And then we look at women’s health, and that becomes a problem. Behavioral health becomes a capacity problem. Sometimes those pieces are true, but they rarely tell the whole story. And the real problems are just tangled. It’s all about people and money and culture and workflow, mission, regulation, trust, emotion, community needs, and just kind of a patient reality that all moves together.

And it’s like if you pull one string, three other things move with it. And that’s the kind of problem that strategic leaders have to face. The phrase that kept coming up for me this week was complex adaptive problems. And those problems do not care about the box that we put them in. They don’t care about the org chart, they don’t care about our preferred timeline, and they don’t care that the board packet is due or that everyone would like a clean answer by Friday.

They are complex because people are involved, living systems are involved, history is involved, incentives are involved, and that matters for healthcare. It matters for communities, it matters for families, it matters for the future, and it matters for AI. It matters for the books that I’ve been writing. The Human First Series is asking a version of this that is just in different language. It keeps asking us to resist the urge to reduce people too quickly.

A woman in pain is more than a symptom, right? A worker is more than output. A leader is more than a title. All of these things just truly matter. The human being is usually the complexity we are tempted to edit out of this the problem. And when we added the human being out of it, our answers get easier, but they also get worse. And that is one of the biggest things that I’m carrying home. The next thing I want to talk about is a phrase that I wrote down this week after one of the lectures, and it was flip the map.

And that idea grab me because changing the map changes what you see. Look at the world from one angle, and certain things just feel central while other things feel distant. But then you turn the map around and suddenly the center changes, the edges change, the routes change, the threats change, the opportunities change. The facts may be the same, but your your understanding of it shifts. Leaders need that more than we admit. And most of us get used to looking at our work from the same direction.

We see the same problems from the same chair, we use the same dashboards, the same meeting rhythms. We tell ourselves that we are seeing the whole picture because we are looking hard. But often we’re looking from one familiar angle. So one of the lectures, one of the people that were speaking, he just said, flip the map. Let’s look at it from a different direction. Let’s look at the problem from the patient side. Look at it from the front desk or the provider who’s booked out and exhausted.

Look at it from the family trying to get care. Look at it from the community partner or the person that doesn’t trust the system. Look at it from the future or beyond the urgent mess of the current week. And that changes things. It applies to the family too, right? Look at the goodbye from your kids’ perspective. Look at the family trip from your wife’s heart. Look at graduation from a young person stepping into her own life. Look at the the grief that from somebody that just wishes that his mom could have seen it, right?

We’ve talked about all of this. It applies to the books. And when I when I wrote Believe Her the first time, part of the work was flipping the map from how men often experience women’s pain to show how women experience our reactions. When I wrote get out of the way, it meant looking past men’s self-image as supportive and paying attention to how women experience the systems men still control. When I wrote The Future Still Needs Us, which is going to come out a couple weeks later, I’m talking about look at what AI can do, but I’m also asking what kind of future we are building and who benefits, who pays the price.

The map that you start with just shapes the answer that feels obvious. Sometimes the work is not moving faster on the old map, and sometimes the work is turning the whole thing around and admitting that we’ve been looking at it from the wrong side. Another War College idea that keeps coming up is the relationship between ends, ways, and means. What are we trying to accomplish? How are we going to do it? And what resources do we actually have? And that sounds simple, but it’s not.

A lot of organizations are full of good intentions and bad alignment. We want big outcomes. We say that access matters, but we do not build the systems to support it. We say people matter, but we don’t protect time for leadership development or feedback or recovery. We say innovation matters, but we punish every failure. We say women’s health matters, but we we do not design care around the actual lives that women are living. And that is aspiration with just nicer fonts, right?

We say it’s we’re working on it and it feels good, but we’re not there. Real strategy forces honesty. What are the ends? What are the ways and what are the means? And then comes the harder question. What are we willing to stop doing so the real priority has a chance? And this is so hard for me. But that is where the room usually gets quiet. Most organizations do not fail because they lack ideas. Many fail because they have too many priorities and not enough courage to choose.

Every idea becomes important, every meeting becomes necessary, every project becomes urgent, every leader is asked to carry more without dropping anything. And that does not create strength, it creates noise. War College has reminded me that strategy requires a choice. It requires discipline. It requires saying no. Here they say yes and it requires knowing the mission clearly enough that you can tell the difference between important work and work that only feels important because it’s loud.

And that matters for me and my work in healthcare. It matters for the human first books too. The books have forced me to ask my own, very own version of these questions. Like, what am I trying to do with this work? I am trying to help people feel seen, help men grow, help families talk, help leaders think. I want to help healthcare stay human, and I want to help people facing AI ask better questions. The way has been writing, music, podcasting, art, and honest conversations, and the means have been my lived experience, my family, my work, my ADHD, the AI tools that help me organize the storm, and a lot of late nights.

And that sounds a little ridiculous when I say it out loud, but it’s true. The mission underneath it is simple. Make something useful, make something human, make something that helps. The biggest personal lesson this week may be the simplest one. Another general spoke and he said, make time to think. And I know that’s not very profound, but it’s very profound. Somebody alert the philosophers, right? Like so deep. But it hit me because I know how easy it is to let reaction take over.

Leaders spend so much time responding. There’s emails and meetings and decisions and urgent requests. There’s things that are broken, there are things that might break, and there’s things that someone thinks are broken because they heard from someone who may or may not know what is happening, right? We get it. The machine just pulls you into reaction. If you are not careful, you start mistaking reaction for leadership. At War College, I have been around people who take thinking seriously, thinking as preparation, thinking as responsibility, thinking as part of the work leaders owe the people who will live with the consequences of their decisions.

And that challenged me. I move fast. Everyone who knows me knows that. My brain moves fast, my ideas move fast. My ADHD can be a gift and a problem depending on the day, the sleep, the calendar, and how many browser tabs are currently threatening national stability, right? But speed and wisdom are not the same thing. And that’s something I’ve been working on. And that one it stings a little when I talk about it. Like I am good at moving, I’m good at seeing connections, I’m good at generating ideas, I’m good at feeling the energy of what could be.

I also need help making space to think, not only produce, not only respond, not only create, but think. Make time to think before the decision hardens. Make time to think before the meeting becomes theater. Make time to think before the urgent thing eats the important thing. Make time to think before the system solves the wrong problem with impressive confidence. And maybe make time to think before writing nine books. But we are so past that already.

So let’s not dwell on it. Thinking is not doing nothing. Sometimes thinking is the work that just keeps the next action from being stupid. And I need that reminder. Maybe you need it too. I don’t know. Another leadership lesson that stayed with me is the importance of knowing what is happening on the ground below the strategy level. Leaders love strategy rooms. We love the big picture. We love the map and the language, and we love saying things like alignment and execution.

And then we should all be fined immediately and sent outside. Real life just happens closer to the ground. If you are a leader, you need to know what is happening two levels below you. Not to micromanage, not to bypass people, not to show up as the hero that nobody requested. You need to know because strategy that does not understand the ground becomes fantasy. In healthcare, ground truth matters. What is actually happening at the front desk? What is actually happening in the exam room?

What are patients actually experiencing, right? What are staff caring? What are the workarounds that have become normal? What confusion has everyone learned to tolerate? And what part of the system looks fine from the dashboard but feels broken to the people living inside of it? And that matters. The same principle applies to families, it applies to communities, it applies to national security, and it applies to the future of AI. When the people closest to the work are telling a different story than the strategy deck, believe the people close to the work.

That is a very human first idea, even if War College gave me the different language for it. Start with the human beings, start with the ground truth, start with what is actually happening, not what the room wishes were happening, and then build from there. One of the conversations that stuck with me this week was about the risk of starting from the wrong frame. A bad assumption at the beginning can send a lot of smart work in the wrong direction. A team can be disciplined, talented, committed, and completely misdirected if the starting point is wrong.

And that applies everywhere. In healthcare, defining the problem poorly leads to poor solutions. If we assume patients miss appointments because they do not care, we miss that transportation, trust, work schedules, childcare, language fear, cost trauma, and all the realities of life that shape access might have been the problem. If we assume that staff resistance is laziness, we miss all the things like burnout and confusion and bad process. If we normalize women’s pain, we miss disease.

If we treat AI only as a productivity tool, we miss power and ethics and labor and creativity and human dignity. Bad starting points become bad strategies. Sometimes the most important leadership move is to stop and ask whether we are asking the right question. And that has become a theme in my life lately. The Human First series is full of that question. Are we asking the right question about women’s pain, about menopause, about women leading, about men growing up, about ADHD, about AD, about tired people trying to make it through the day, right?

A lot of bad answers begin with bad questions. And War College reminded me that strategy starts before the plan. It starts with the frame, it starts with a problem definition. It starts with the courage to say, I think we may be looking at this wrong. And that is hard in leadership because people like confidence. They like certainty and they like the person who walks in with a plan, but false certainty gets expensive. And I would rather slow down and ask the better question.

At least that is what I am trying to learn. Well, as I get ready to go home from this week, I keep thinking about how all of this connects. War College gave me strategy language, the books gave me human language, and Heritage Health and my family give me real-world responsibility. Like my family just gives me the reason any of it matters as well. And that is the thread. The human first books released June 30th. Early interest has been so fun. So thank you very much.

I want to say thank you, thank you, thank you to everybody that’s reached out and your messages and to the people that have helped me bring this to the forefront for everyone. I love it. I know that I keep saying that, but I do not want to rush past it. These books have been a wild amount of work. Um I can’t even explain how much work these have been. Uh a lot of people try to write one book in a year, and something happened in this brain of mine.

So these books are honest, they’re personal, and they have my heart and soul in them. Hearing that people are already interested and already connecting and already seeing pieces of themselves or piece people that they love in the work, it means a lot. It also makes this war college week land differently. Strategy needs humanity, humanity needs discipline, and we need both. We need heart and clarity, we need care and follow through, we need mission and humility, and we need leaders who can think and still feel.

We have to have systems that can execute without forgetting the people inside of them. And that is what I am taking home. I don’t want to come back and make everything sound like a military seminar. That would be really weird and not useful. But I do want to come back with deeper respect for thinking and strategy and problem framing and perspective and the responsibility leaders carry when the stakes are high. And I want to keep building the human first work from that place.

It’s more grounded, it’s more disciplined, it’s more useful, but still human. So that is what I have been carrying this week. I’m sorry that I’m late. Um, but we’re gonna remember to flip the map, know what is happening close to the ground. We’re gonna be honest about ends, ways, and means. We’re gonna watch for bad starting points, we’re gonna make time for time to think. And in the middle of all of that, do not forget the human being. That is the whole thing for me right now.

Whether I’m sitting at the War College leading in healthcare, writing books at night, or thinking about AI or talking about women’s pain, or just trying to be a better husband and dad, the question keeps coming back. Are we starting with the person? Are we telling the truth about the problem? Are we making time to think before we move? Are we building something that helps? I hope so. The Human First Books released June 30th. Thank you for the early interest, thank you for the encouragement, thank you for staying with me through this while this episode is shot in a hotel room with a portable microphone.

Thanks for helping me bring the books into the world. I am coming home from War College with a full laptop full of notes and just a full brain. And that’s dangerous, I realize, but I’m also coming home grateful, grateful for the chance to learn, grateful for the people doing hard work in hard places, and grateful for the mission that I get to oversee at Heritage Health and in my family and in this new endeavor with books and music and art. I just I’m grateful.

I’m so grateful. I’m grateful for everyone who has already shown interest and still convinced that the future needs leaders who can think clearly without becoming cold. This is still here, still trying. I’m Mike Baker. Stay human, make time to think, keep showing up. I’ll see you next week.