Listening for the Future That Wants to Emerge
Watercolor will not do what you tell it. You choose the pigment, the water ratio, how wet the paper is, the angle of the board. And then the brush touches the page, and the paint moves according to its own logic. It blooms. It granulates. It runs somewhere you did not send it. The most you can do is set the conditions and then watch what actually happens.
You cannot get to that moment without preparation. And you cannot control what happens once you are in it. Both are true at the same time, in the same stroke.
Tom Hoffman writes about this in the closing pages of Watercolor Painting:
"There will always be an element of chance when you work with paint that wants to flow, and that is as it should be. Without risk and surprise, the finished paintings would be lifeless. What we seek, therefore, is a balance between thoughtfulness and spontaneity."
And:
"Take the time to discover where and when you need to be careful, so that you have room to be carefree. It is up to you. Take charge, and take chances. And have fun."
The easy misread is to hear this as permission to let go. Trust the process, stop overthinking, see what happens. That is not what he is describing. A painter who has not done the work, who does not know their pigment or their paper or what a wash does when it hits a damp surface, does not get happy accidents. They get mud. The spontaneity only works because of the thoughtfulness underneath it. You are not choosing between control and surrender. You are building the discernment to do both at once.
There is a name for this outside of painting. Otto Scharmer, at MIT, calls it presencing, a word he made up by fusing "sensing" and "presence." The core idea, developed through the Presencing Institute, is that the most important leadership move is not planning harder or reacting faster. It is learning to sense and connect with the future that is already trying to emerge, rather than projecting the past forward and calling it a strategy.
That is not passive. It takes real discipline to let go of the plan you walked in with, long enough to notice what the actual moment is asking for. And it takes real discipline to have done enough preparation that you can recognize it when it shows up. Letting go and getting ready are not opposites. They are the same practice, pointed in two directions.
I have been noticing this in myself, watching how differently I approach watercolor than almost anything else in my life. I have no ambition to become Sargent. No plan to show anyone what I make. Most days I am just following a rabbit hole of curiosity: this pigment, this paper, this particular blue at low tide. It feels like play precisely because nothing is riding on the outcome. Which is the opposite of a pattern I have spent a long time naming in myself and in my clients, the instinct to close every gap between what is and what could be, until the gap itself starts to feel like the emergency. More on that pattern, which I have come to think is less about fear than about fidelity to potential, in an episode called Living in the Gap, if you want the longer version.
For leaders, this is shadow work before it is a skill. You already have a default setting. Some of us grip tighter when things get uncertain, control the variables, run the plan harder. Some of us let go too early, ride the wave, call it trust when it is closer to avoidance. Neither is a character flaw. Both are patterns you picked up somewhere, and both will misfire the moment the situation actually needs the other one.
Seeing your own pattern is not about becoming a different person for its own sake. It is because what is actually needed right now, in your team, your organization, the problems you are being asked to solve, requires something specific of you. Not novelty. Responsiveness.
I think this is part of why the leadership being modeled at the highest levels of power right now feels so out of step. What we are watching is mostly grip. Holding on, tighter, at precisely the moment holding on has stopped working. That posture cannot build real alliances or create outcomes where more than one side wins, because that has never been what a grip is for. And it is a strategy built for a world with room to spare. We do not have that room anymore. Organizations cannot pretend their choices have no cost to the systems around them. Growth cannot be unlimited. We are operating inside real constraints, and the problems in front of us are bigger and more entangled than they have been in a long time.
The leaders I work with feel the size of that. Big hearts, real missions, high stakes. Which is exactly why gripping harder will not get any of us where we need to go. Something more like presencing will.
This is the fourth piece in a series on discernment as a leadership skill that I originally posted on LinkedIn. Part 1: Thinking in Layers | Part 2: Read It Like a Painting | Part 3: What Are You Making Invisible?
I explore ideas like this on my podcast, Upleveling Work. Come find me there.
