Anthropologist · Lecturer at Columbia University · Former Director, Center for International Conflict Resolution · Advisor to Senior Executives and Entrepreneurs
A place to think when the decisions are yours to make.
There is a paradox I have observed after many years of working with leaders. The more responsibility you carry, the fewer places you have where you can think freely.
It is not because you are alone. Quite the opposite. Your days are filled with people: colleagues, partners, board members, employees, lawyers, consultants, friends, and family. Many know you well. Some understand your business better than anyone.
But everyone sees your situation from a different angle. Everyone has a role, a history, an interest, an expectation.
And so, as responsibility grows, certain conversations become harder to have.
You may be uncertain about a decision everyone expects you to make confidently. You may distrust someone you are supposed to trust. You may sense that a strategy you publicly supported is no longer the right one. You may be angry and know that acting from that anger would be a mistake.
Or perhaps nothing is obviously wrong. You simply sense that something important is changing—in the business, in a relationship, or in yourself—and you have not yet found the language for it.
These are often the moments when having a place to think matters most.
That is how I have come to understand my work as a Private Leadership Advisor: as a relationship in which you can step outside the immediacy of the situation, see more of what is happening, question your own interpretation, and exercise better judgment about what comes next.
I don’t make the decision for you. The decision remains yours to make.
I work directly with leaders, and with organizations seeking an independent advisory relationship for a senior executive.
Leadership is ultimately an exercise in judgment.
Senior leaders rarely suffer from a lack of information. More often, they have too much of it.
The harder task is deciding what matters. What is signal and what is noise. Whether someone’s resistance contains something you need to hear or simply needs to be overcome. Whether a relationship can be repaired. Whether the risk you are seeing is real or amplified by fear. Whether this is the moment to act, confront, wait, or walk away.
There is no framework that can make those decisions for you. They require judgment.
And judgment depends not only on what you know. It depends on what you are capable of seeing—and on how free you are from the forces within yourself that can distort what you see.
That is the territory of my advisory work.
Every strategic challenge eventually becomes a human challenge.
A client once came into one of our conversations wanting to discuss a business relationship.
There was an opportunity on the table. The question seemed strategic: How should he negotiate it? What position should he take? How firm should he be?
We talked about the business. But as I listened, I became interested in something else.
He had a history of saying yes very quickly when opportunities were brought to him by people he valued. So I asked what made it difficult for him to slow down.
At first, we stayed with the obvious explanations. Then something deeper emerged.
He realized that part of him feared losing the opportunity. Underneath that was another fear: if he did not say yes, perhaps he would damage the relationship. Perhaps he would be left out.
The conversation had changed.
We were no longer talking only about how he negotiated. We were looking at the place from which he negotiated.
That distinction is central to my work.
You can understand negotiation extremely well and still make a poor agreement because the fear of losing a relationship is negotiating on your behalf. You can understand organizational politics and still misread a situation because your need for recognition is influencing what you see. You can know that patience is strategically wise and still send the message tonight because something inside you desperately wants the uncertainty to end.
This is why I have come to believe that every strategic challenge eventually becomes a human challenge.
And very often, the human challenge brings us back to ourselves.
What are you not seeing?
My original training was not in business. I am an anthropologist.
Anthropology taught me to look beneath the surface. What people say matters, but it is rarely the whole story. If you want to understand what is happening inside a community, an organization, or a family, you have to pay attention to behavior, relationships, history, language, status, alliances, and silences.
You learn to notice the difference between formal authority and actual influence. You become curious about what everybody knows but nobody says.
My work in conflict resolution and negotiation added another layer to that way of seeing. For years, I worked in environments where the stated position was often just the entry point to the real problem. Underneath were interests, fears, identities, loyalties, relationships, and power.
Working closely with executives and entrepreneurs taught me that the same principle applies inside the person making the decision.
We do not simply observe reality. We interpret it.
A colleague’s disagreement can be useful resistance or disloyalty. A delay can look like prudence or rejection. An aggressive competitor can represent a genuine threat or awaken an old need to prove oneself.
The facts matter. But so does the meaning we give them.
For more than twenty-five years, my work across anthropology, conflict resolution, negotiation, and leadership has placed me close to people making consequential decisions.
I teach conflict resolution and negotiation at Columbia University, where I previously directed the Center for International Conflict Resolution, and I have worked with senior executives, entrepreneurs, family businesses, and complex organizations—often at moments when business decisions could not be separated from relationships, power, identity, and human behavior.
Across those very different environments, one question has remained remarkably useful:
What are you not seeing?
I don’t ask it because I assume I know the answer, but because the quality of our decisions depends, in no small part, on the quality of what we are capable of seeing.
The person making the decision is part of the decision.
I do not draw a hard line between strategy and inner work.
We might begin by discussing an acquisition and find ourselves exploring a difficult relationship with a partner. That may reveal a pattern around recognition or control. From there, we may return to the acquisition with a very different understanding of the decision.
We might begin with frustration toward a colleague and discover that the frustration is telling us something important about a boundary you have repeatedly failed to protect.
Or we may start with a business opportunity and eventually encounter a more uncomfortable question:
What am I still trying to prove, and to whom?
None of this makes the conversation less strategic. It makes it more so. Because the person making the decision is part of the decision-making system.
Your assumptions, history, emotional state, ambitions, fears, and need for recognition do not disappear when you enter the boardroom. They enter with you. The question is whether you can see them.
This is also where contemplative practice has become important to my understanding of leadership. I don’t introduce contemplation as a belief system, nor do I confuse advisory with therapy. Its purpose here is practical: to develop the interior space from which better judgment and action become possible.
You begin to notice anger without immediately acting from anger. You recognize fear without automatically obeying it. You become aware of the impulse to defend, attack, please, impress, or control before that impulse becomes behavior.
A little more space appears between what happens and what you do next.
I call that personal sovereignty.
It is the capacity to remain fully present to what is happening within you without allowing everything happening within you to become an instruction.
For a leader, that small interior space can change the course of a conversation, a negotiation, a relationship—and sometimes an organization.
Why I call this advisory.
I use the word advisory deliberately.
This is not a coaching relationship in which my role is primarily to help you discover your own answers. I bring a perspective. I draw on what I know about conflict, negotiation, human behavior, and the context we build together.
Sometimes I will challenge your interpretation. Sometimes I will offer one of my own.
I will ask questions, but I will not hide behind questions when I have a perspective that may be useful. If I think you are misreading a situation, I will tell you. If I notice a pattern, I will put it on the table.
We may examine the interests and power dynamics surrounding a decision, prepare for a difficult conversation, explore the consequences of different moves, or consider what another person may be seeing that you are not.
At other times, my most useful contribution will be to resist giving you an answer. Because sometimes the problem is not that you don’t know what to do.
It is that you have not yet seen enough to know what the real problem is.
I am not there to run your business. You almost certainly know your industry better than I do. You have lawyers, financial advisors, executives, and technical experts whose expertise I have no interest in replacing.
My contribution is different.
I sit beside the decision and look at it from another angle.
Over time, we build something valuable: shared context.
My advisory is not built around a predetermined curriculum. There is no sequence of leadership competencies we need to complete.
Your life provides the curriculum.
The company continues moving while we work. People surprise you. Partnerships change. Opportunities emerge. Someone disappoints you. A negotiation takes an unexpected turn. A conversation you have been avoiding can no longer be postponed.
That becomes our material.
I work with a small number of leaders in long-term advisory relationships, typically over six or twelve months. We establish a regular rhythm of private conversations while maintaining enough flexibility to speak when a consequential situation requires it.
But something happens over time that is difficult to create in a series of disconnected sessions.
We build shared context.
I begin to know the names. I know the history behind the difficult relationship. I remember what happened six months ago when a similar situation emerged. I understand which person has formal authority and which one actually influences the room. I begin to recognize when a pattern we have encountered before is returning in a different form.
We no longer have to reconstruct your world every time we speak. We can begin closer to the question that actually matters.
Sometimes timing itself becomes part of the value. A brief conversation while a situation is unfolding can be more consequential than a long conversation after the important decision has already been made.
The point is not access for its own sake. It is the possibility of thinking together while thinking can still change what happens next.
Some situations require more than technical expertise.
There are moments when a problem cannot be understood through business logic alone.
A senior executive steps into significantly greater responsibility and discovers that what worked at the previous level no longer works here. A talented leader becomes entangled in organizational politics. A CEO needs a genuinely independent counterpart. A succession changes relationships around authority and power. A difficult stakeholder relationship begins affecting execution. Or a technically solvable problem keeps returning because something human underneath it has never been addressed.
In family enterprises, these layers can become even harder to separate.
A strategic decision may also carry decades of family history. A succession conversation can involve authority, inheritance, identity, loyalty, love, and belonging at the same time. The person with formal authority may not be the person with the greatest emotional influence.
These are not “soft” issues surrounding the real business problem. They are often part of the business problem. The work begins with the leader, but its consequences do not end there.
When a leader becomes better able to distinguish interpretation from fact, tolerate disagreement without becoming defensive, recognize a pattern before repeating it, or remain clear under pressure, other people experience the difference.
Conversations, relationships, decisions—they all change.
The executive experiences the change from the inside. The organization experiences it through the quality of leadership that follows.
Success can create a new kind of question.
Many of the leaders I work with have already accomplished a great deal.
They know how to perform. They have made difficult decisions, built organizations, created wealth, developed reputations, and carried responsibilities that few people around them fully understand.
They are not trying to escape ambition. Often, they remain extraordinarily ambitious. But there can come a point when the question changes.
For years, ambition, discipline, urgency, competitiveness, and perhaps the need to prove what you were capable of may have served you extremely well. Those forces can build remarkable things.
Eventually, however, another question can appear:
Do the forces that brought me here need to be the same forces that take me forward?
You may still want to double the company. Build something new. Acquire a competitor. Create wealth. Exercise influence. Take on a larger role.
The work is not about becoming less ambitious. It is about becoming less unconsciously governed by ambition.
The question is no longer simply What comes next?
It becomes:
Who do I want to be in what comes next?
That conversation may involve purpose and legacy, your relationship with success, marriage, parenthood, friendship, mortality, or spirituality. It may involve the difference between what you have built and what actually matters to you.
I welcome those conversations.
I don’t believe we need to separate the executive from the human being in order to do serious leadership work. At a certain level, that separation becomes artificial.
The executive, entrepreneur, partner, parent, spouse, and person sitting alone at the end of the day are not different people.
The deeper work is often about reducing the distance between them.
This work requires something from you, too.
A strong advisory relationship is not built on agreement.
I may challenge how you are reading a situation. I may ask a question you would prefer not to answer immediately. We may discover that someone else’s behavior is part of the problem while also recognizing the part that belongs to you.
I can work with uncertainty, resistance, disagreement, and difficult truths.
What I cannot substitute for is curiosity.
This work is most valuable for leaders willing to examine not only what other people are doing, but also how their own assumptions, behavior, history, and patterns may be shaping what happens next.
You don’t need to arrive with the answers. But you do need to be willing to look.
Two ways the relationship begins.
Sometimes a leader comes to me directly.
There is a consequential decision, a difficult relationship, a transition, or perhaps a larger question that has become difficult to think through alone. We begin there.
At other times, the conversation begins with a CEO, CHRO, board member, family office, or organization considering advisory support for a senior executive.
In that case, we begin by understanding the context: why the advisory is being considered, what the organization hopes the relationship will support, and whether there is a genuine fit between the leader and me.
When an organization sponsors the advisory, confidentiality is fundamental.
Before the work begins, we clarify expectations with both the leader and the sponsor, including how progress can appropriately be discussed and what must remain private.
The content of our advisory conversations belongs to the leader. That confidentiality is not incidental. It is one of the conditions that makes candor possible.
At the same time, confidentiality does not mean organizational objectives disappear. We can agree from the beginning on what the engagement is intended to support and create appropriate ways of reflecting on progress without turning a confidential advisory relationship into a reporting mechanism.
The leader needs a place where nothing has to be performed. The organization needs confidence that the work is serious and relevant. A well-designed advisory relationship can protect both.
What changes?
The changes that matter most are often quiet at first.
You notice them in the few seconds between receiving a difficult message and deciding how to respond. In a negotiation where you can feel the fear of losing the deal without allowing that fear to negotiate for you. In a tense meeting where disagreement no longer feels like a threat to your authority.
You begin to see more before you act.
You recognize sooner when the need to prove something has entered a decision. You become more willing to have the conversation you once avoided, or to set a boundary without immediately fearing what it might cost you. You discover that you can remain with uncertainty a little longer, without manufacturing certainty simply to escape the discomfort of not knowing.
This does not make you less decisive. It makes you less reactive.
And over time, these seemingly small shifts begin to change the way you lead. You become better able to distinguish what is actually happening from the meaning you are giving it. Difficult relationships become easier to read. You can remain firm without turning disagreement into unnecessary conflict. The distance between what you say matters to you and how you actually behave begins to narrow.
Others may notice the difference before they can name it. They experience a leader who listens differently, responds with greater deliberation, holds boundaries more clearly, and remains present when the situation becomes difficult.
Good leadership does not eliminate conflict, ambiguity, fear, or difficult decisions. The greater your responsibility, the less realistic that expectation becomes.
What can change is the quality of the person meeting them.
And that brings me to the question that matters more to me than any leadership scorecard:
Is there less distance between the person you want to be and the person from whom you are actually living and leading?
A place to think.
The higher the stakes, the greater the temptation to move quickly.
Sometimes that is exactly what leadership requires. But there are also moments when the most consequential thing you can do is create enough distance from the noise to see what is difficult to see while standing inside it.
To notice what everyone else has normalized. To question an assumption that has quietly become a fact. To understand the person sitting across from you differently. To recognize what fear, ambition, loyalty, anger, or the need for recognition may be adding to the situation.
And then to return to the decision with a wider view.
The decision remains yours. That is precisely why having a place where you can think freely matters.
A place where you don’t have to perform certainty. Where you can say what you are not yet ready to say elsewhere. Where an assumption can be questioned before it becomes a decision. Where strategy, power, relationships, and what is happening within the person making the decision can belong to the same conversation.
Not so that someone else can tell you what to do. But so that you can exercise your own judgment with greater clarity and freedom.
And, every so often, have someone beside you willing to ask the question that becomes increasingly difficult to ask yourself:
What are you not seeing?
If there is a consequential decision, relationship, transition, or question you are carrying right now, we can begin there.
If you are considering advisory support for a senior executive, we can begin with a confidential conversation about the context, what you hope the relationship will support, and whether there is a genuine fit.
Aldo Civico
Anthropologist and Private Leadership Advisor