Function - Stefan’s Week-notes 16/11/2025
Inspired by the weeknotes of friends and coachees including John Fitzgerald, Steve Messer and Nour Sidawi - I thought I'd give it a go.
Weeknotes - Function
This week has been about FUNCTION - the part of transformation which dictates, not how well something is received but how something works. There are a lot of emperors new cloths in change and transformation. But there is only one transformation; the one that works.
1. What activities did I get up to this week?
This week included a meeting with an operations and transformation director, and time spent writing an Intent vs Impact session for an organisational seminar I’m delivering in London this December.
I mentored several delegates from the Launching into Digital Marketing programme that I support, and delivered a group mentoring session as part of the same cohort.
Coaching-wise, it was the first session with the CMO of a global consulting business, alongside another with a public sector digital architect – two very different contexts, both orbiting questions of clarity, influence, and identity.
I also met with Liam, founder of the Solstice Series, where we went deep into cadence, digital mapping of performance, and what it means to train and lead with purpose.
2. What’s the central theme or thread that tied my week together?
Function.
Dieter Rams once said, “Good design is as little design as possible.”
He meant that clarity, purpose, and usefulness are themselves beautiful.
This week reminded me that while form matters to me - the elegance, the shape, the clarity – it is the function that carries the deeper truth. When something actually works – aligns, lands, supports, or unlocks - that is where real beauty lives.
A small nod to systems theory:
Form emerges from function – not the other way round.
3. What moments lit me up this week?
A coaching session with a public sector digital transformation architect absolutely lit me up. We explored the transformation wave–current convergence – the tension between driving the growth agenda (the wave) while managing the transformation already happening underneath (the current).
For the first time, I shared a model that has lived in my head for years in different iterations. Watching it land was brilliant. It reminded me of Donald Schön’s idea of the reflective practitioner – the notion that we often know more than we can articulate until the right moment reveals it.
The session was so impactful the coachee told me I had to write it up – so I did, along with the illustration. You can read the piece here
The other moment came in a group mentoring session, when a delegate summed up who I am and what I do – beautifully – based on a handful of answers I’d given.
Carl Rogers once wrote, “What is most personal is most universal.”
It felt like that. Being fully seen.
4. What did I wrestle with this week?
Growing the business – my coaching practice and Be The Waves.
My coaching practice is the deeply personal craft of helping individuals step into their capability. It is one component of something larger; be the waves.
Be The Waves is the larger movement – the collaboration, the mindset, the philosophy of stewardship becoming a consultancy. It’s coaches to bring together, a board of founders to raise, a shape slowly revealing itself.
This week held the tension between the two.
A tension Robert Kegan would call competing commitments – both true, both necessary, both asking to be held without collapsing one into the other.
Not a bad wrestle – but a real one.
5. What personal moments felt significant this week?
Telling my best mate Jason that I loved him.
We’ve shared heartache, care, and countless bike rides – overcoming mechanicals on trips and in life. There’s a friendship that forms only through miles ridden and storms weathered.
He reminded me this week that I need to take care of my body, and that sport is meant to be about fun and longevity. Another season of racing might not be the best thing for me right now – and he gently suggested I remember that.
Terry Real says, “Love is an action, not a feeling.”
This was that. A friend acting with care when I needed it.
6. What metaphor or image captures the feeling of this week?
An image from VisualizeValue:
“You can’t find yourself because you are what’s looking.”
It reminded me of Jung’s line:
“Who looks outside dreams; who looks inside awakens.”
We are often blind to ourselves.
Coaching – whether individual, collective, or systemic – is about holding up the mirror so people can finally see what is already there.
7. Where did I see stewardship in practice this week?
In a CMO’s willingness to park their own agenda – the drive, the instinct for pace, the hunger to achieve – in favour of what their team needed.
Ron Heifetz describes adaptive leadership as learning to “regulate distress.”
Not suppress it. Not fuel it. But hold the heat at a level where people can think, breathe, and grow.
This coachee did exactly that. A quiet act of stewardship.
8. What did I notice beneath the surface this week?
Network nepotism.
A rise in people becoming ever more attached to the appearance of association – who looks good to be seen with, to work with, to endorse. Optics over substance.
Brené Brown writes:
“People will choose being impressive over being real if they believe their worth depends on it.”
I saw it personally too – a former coachee, risen through our work together, now shifting into a more “suited and booted” support structure. I’m fine with it, but it made me pause:
What else, and who else, are you rejecting in the climb?
The old truth remains:
The way you climb is the way you arrive.
9. What am I carrying forward into next week?
Thoughts of when next to visit London – for coffee, cake, coaching, and the conversations that only seem to happen there.
Thoughts of Christmas at Mum’s – close now.
And the growing need to book the first Be The Waves coaching forum.
Kurt Lewin noted that “unfreezing precedes moving.”
I feel in the unfreezing – imagining, preparing, loosening – and that matters.
10. What am I reading?
I’m continuing to read Ladies Can’t Climb Ladders by Jane Robinson - a beautifully written social history of the first generation of women who fought their way into professional life after WWI.
It’s reminding me how many of today’s workplace norms were shaped by structures never designed with women in mind, and why those echoes still show up in coaching rooms and leadership teams.
As a white man working in transformation and performance, it’s a grounding reminder that what we call “culture” is really just inherited design – and that part of my work is learning to notice what others have had to navigate for generations.
I’m now 60 pages in and I love this paragraph
11. What writing flowed from me this week?
Only one main piece – the write-up of the wave–current convergence model – but it felt significant.
And the piece on the transformation of the butterfly – the reminder that remaining a caterpillar for a little longer is no bad thing.
In complexity theory, there is a simple truth:
Non-linearity is not failure – it is reality.
Caterpillars dissolve before they re-form.
Ideas do too.
12. How do I want to sign off this week?
I’ll sign off by saying: Be The Waves is coming.
If you’ve spoken to me about it and thought it a good idea, tell me to stick at it. Offer help. Offer time. And if you have coaching work or transformation underway that needs a deeply experienced ear – let me know.
The work I love – and I was born to do it.
The finding of it drains my life force. Not because I don’t enjoy the conversations, but because of the circles we all run in to avoid naming the truth:
what I know will help you – and experience comes at a cost.
Steven Pressfield wrote, “The pain of not doing your work is greater than the pain of doing it.”
That line sits with me this week.
I’m not emperor’s new clothes.
I’m samurai – yoroi and katana.
13. What question do I want to leave myself (and others) with?
If you could find the support you needed, would you continue?
A reminder from psychology:
Support doesn’t remove responsibility – it unlocks it.
Love to all,
Stefan
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For now; thank you
I am…
An executive coach and the CEO of Be The Waves, growing stewardship for a thriving planet.
I helping good people lead great things; in other words - I empower Stewardship
Good people care about others, our planet and beauty. Great things are changes for the betterment of society and all that lives within an around it. It sounds big and fun - it is.
I'm also an endurance racing cyclist and a go getter.
You can read more about me and what I do; how I work here