Revising an Overextended Metaphor

I’m a good guitarist. I play in bands, I do solo gigs, and my lead breaks often get applause. No one listening would think I had any cause for concern about my playing. 

But I did. I knew I was playing versions and variants of the things I’d always played. I got lessons from a really good guitarist ages ago, and that shifted me quite a bit. I wrote a blog once about trying to learn Hotel California. I still can’t play it, but I recognise how I’ve incorporated the famous Chuck Berry lick into everything I do. It was useful but it’s still the same lick, dressed up in different clothes. 

Nothing wrong, but not ‘everything right’. Good, not great. And I’d been good-not-great for a long time. 

I had a similar experience with my singing, which was honestly pretty weak. Then I went to a teacher, and in just one term she unlocked my voice. It’s now vastly improved — not because she gave me years of theory, but because she heard what I couldn’t hear and showed me the fix.  

So when I joined a new band playing material that was new to me, I knew I needed that again. I needed someone who could see the gap I couldn’t see.  

So of course I asked ChatGPT to tell me what was wrong with my guitar playing. 

I fed it the five songs I was working on and asked for a gap analysis. What is the music asking for, and what am I actually giving it? The answer came back in about ninety seconds. It was humbling. And it was brutal. 

First, the diagnosis: self-taught guitarists don’t want to make mistakes. So we play it safe. We find what works and we stay there — not because we lack ability, but because we’ve learned to avoid the risk of sounding bad. Every solo, every fill, every choice gets filtered through the same question: will this definitely not be wrong? And over time it just becomes just how we play. 

Damn. I’d never consciously thought of it like that, but yes, that is what is running along as a subterranean stream in my mind. 

Pentatonic autopilot. Safe, reliable, never terrible — and never quite right for the song. 

Then, the fix. And this is the part that really got me. It wasn’t “learn jazz theory.” or “master five new scales.” It was one thing. 

Pause on the 6th. 

That’s it. One note. The note I’d been skating past my entire playing life because it didn’t feel safe, it sounded sort of wrong, because it asks you to sit in a moment of tension instead of resolving it. One small, deliberate choice that changes the colour of everything around it. 

AI surfaced this in ninety seconds. Not because it’s smarter than a human teacher — it isn’t — but because it has no stake in being polite. It just showed me the gap. 

Here’s the thing though. Knowing about the 6th didn’t make me better. The fix only works when I choose it in the moment — when I’m under pressure, when my fingers want to go back to what’s safe, when the familiar pattern is right there and the new choice feels clunky and exposed. 

The deliberate choice feels worse than the habit it’s replacing.  

Now forget the guitar. 

I’ve been working with managers for over twenty years, and this is the exact arc every competent manager travels — or doesn’t. They’re not bad managers. They get results, they keep things moving, their teams don’t complain. Nobody looking in from the outside would say there’s a problem. 

But the best ones know they’ve stalled. 

They know they’re running versions and variants of the same management moves they’ve always made. They want to be better, they sense there is another level, but what stops them is the same root cause. They don’t want to make a mistake so they stick to what they know. Every interaction gets filtered through the same invisible question: will this definitely not be wrong? And over time that filter becomes their ceiling. 

Pentatonic autopilot for managers. 

The problem is invisible to everyone except the person living it. They can’t see what they’re not doing, because what they are doing seems to work fine. This is where AI is starting to change the game — not by replacing the human work, but by surfacing the patterns people can’t see in themselves. The gap between what they’re doing and what the situation actually needs. 

But the fix — and this is important — isn’t the diagnosis. The fix isn’t more knowledge or another model. It’s the equivalent of pausing on the 6th. One deliberate choice: preparing for each interaction in advance, deciding where you’ll land the hard message, committing to the uncomfortable moment before you walk into the room. 

And yes, it will feel unnatural. Managers who start leading deliberately almost always tell me it feel self-conscious and awkward at first That’s the 6th note feeling wrong under my fingers when the safe pattern is sitting right there, begging to be played. The discomfort isn’t a sign you’re doing it wrong. It’s a sign you’re crossing the gap between knowing and doing, and thazt’s where all the magic happens 

My singing teacher unlocked my voice in one term. AI showed me my guitar ceiling in ninety seconds. In both cases the fix was simple — not easy, but simple. And in both cases the knowledge was already there. Someone just had to show me I wasn’t using it. 

Your managers are the same. Good people, doing good work, stuck at a level they don’t need to be stuck at. It’s not because they don’t know enough, it’s because they’ve learned to play it safe. 

In our programme we talk about this as “One Uncomfortable Thing” every day. To go back to my metaphor, Chat wasn’t saying ‘play that 6th repeatedly in every riff’, it was saying choose one place where I’ll make myself uncomfortable. And not even every song, just choose a song where I’m going be deliberate about adding that note. 

And be comfortable with feeling uncomfortable. 

Post Script: So I did this on the weekend at our gig. I made a lot more mistakes, but I was okay with that (kind of). I don’t feel it made a big difference yet, but I don’t know that I pushed it hard enough. I feel like I might have slid off the 6th a bit quick and stuck to my pattern a bit much. I think I’m going to have to exaggerate the change when we play on Thursday to see if I can make myself more uncomfortable. And better.