Our teachers were sending tech requests every way imaginable. Sticky notes on the copier. Emails to whoever they’d seen last. A ticket system would fix that: one place for requests, one person to sort them and keep teachers posted. I gave it to Walt, our lead technician.

Walt could reimage a cart of laptops before lunch and diagnose a dying projector by the sound of its fan. He had been keeping those machines running longer than I’d been there.

Three months in, my inbox was full of teachers asking whether anyone ever saw their ticket.

(I had a few of those tickets sitting in my own inbox, too. I’d forwarded them to Walt and considered them handled.)

The easy verdict

My first read wrote itself. Teachers were frustrated, so Walt wasn’t keeping up.

So I walked the buildings with him to find out what was falling through. Nothing was. Almost every ticket was closed or waiting on a part, and Walt could tell me the status of each one from memory. The replies never went out. One teacher had given up and borrowed a projector from the library. Walt had fixed hers two days after she asked. She never knew.

When I asked why the replies weren’t going out, he said he figured fixing it was the reply.

He was right. That was the job he heard.

A teacher with a dead projector needs two things: the projector working, and someone telling her it will be working by Thursday. The second one takes a person at a desk. Walt was almost never at a desk. That’s a big part of why he was so good at his job.

(Before anyone judges Walt: if you asked me to run a ticket queue from under a teacher’s desk with a flashlight in my teeth, you’d get the same result. Worse, probably.)

The person in my plan

Fixing things and keeping people informed about the fixing are two separate skills. My plan treated them as one.

Walt had told me as much. After the first month, he said he figured his part was the repairs and somebody in the office would keep people posted. My first reaction was that teachers still deserved a reply. That’s still true. It was also a clue I walked right past.

Who drives which stretch

When my husband and I go out with our Land Rover club, he drives the harder sections. That’s a decision about who belongs in the seat for that piece of trail.

That’s the idea behind Read the Terrain. Diagnose before you direct. Look at the conditions before you decide what to do about them. A pile of unanswered tickets could have meant several things. Maybe the system was built wrong, or it was the wrong solution altogether. Maybe Walt never understood what I was asking of him. Each of those calls for a different response, and none of them was visible from my office. If I’d skipped that look, I would have corrected whatever was easiest to see, which was Walt.

Caption: Read the Terrain: Leadership Under Real Conditions. Launching November 2.

My solution was sound. A ticket system solves a real problem, and from my office it looked finished the day I rolled it out.

It was built around a person who sits at a desk and answers messages between tasks. I handed it to a man who worked with both hands, usually in somebody’s classroom, out of earshot of his email. The plan and the person never met until three months of unanswered tickets forced the introduction.

That gap is easy to miss because it lives in your head. When you design a solution, you picture someone carrying it out. Usually that someone works the way you work and has the time you assume they have. Then the plan lands on a real person with a real day, and the distance between the two shows up as frustration, often aimed at the wrong person.

Catching it starts before any fix. Before a plan leaves your desk, ask who you pictured doing it, and how closely that picture matches the person who will.

A question for you

Think about the last solution you handed to someone else to carry out. Who did you picture doing it when you designed it, and is that the person doing it now?

Leave a comment

P.S. Read the Terrain: Leadership Under Real Conditions is out now. If this essay was useful, the book is the long version. Get your copy here.

Read the Terrain: Leadership Under Real Conditions is officially a book you can buy, hold, dog-ear, and argue with in the margins. (Please argue with it in the margins. That’s how I’ll know it’s working.)

I wrote it for one person. She got the job because she was the best in the room. She’s the calm one in every meeting, the one everyone leans on, and nobody holds her steady. Somewhere along the way she started wondering if she even likes this anymore.

If that’s you, this book is for you. If that’s someone on your team, hand it to them.

Each of the eleven chapters names a leadership pattern that smart, capable people fall into without noticing. Then I tell you where I learned it on the trail, usually the hard way, at least once with a wheel in the air. Every chapter ends with steps you can take this week. Not journal prompts. Steps.

The whole book comes down to one argument: leadership breaks down when we optimize for looking good instead of reading what’s real. Force fails. Reading wins.

Where to get it

📕 Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
📗 Barnes & Noble (paperback and eBook)
📘 Bookshop.org: (paperback and eBook)
Bookshop.org supports independent bookstores, so if you have a favorite indie, this is a great way to buy and help them at the same time. You can also walk into your local store and ask them to order it by title. That tells a bookstore someone wants it, which matters more than people think.

Your help is valued.

• Leave a review on Amazon and/or Goodreads once you’ve read it. Reviews are how new books get found.

• Forward this email to one leader who needs it.

Thank you for being here for the long, bumpy road to this day. I couldn’t have gotten here without the people who read early drafts, sent notes, and kept asking “when’s the book coming out?”

The answer is today.

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This week’s question: What’s one thing at work you’ve been handling by looking calm instead of reading what’s real?

Hit reply and tell me. I read every one.

TODAY’S THE DAY!!!

Read the Terrain: Leadership Under Real Conditions is officially out in the world. A real book. With a real spine. That you can hold in your actual hands. 📖

👉 GET YOUR COPY

Where to find it

Pretty much any online bookseller can get it to you. Amazon will probably get it to your door the fastest, but pick your favorite:

• Amazon (paperback)

• Barnes & Noble (paperback)

• Bookshop.org (paperback) if you love supporting indie bookstores

• Ebook at every ebook store for the Kindle, Nook, and Apple Books crowd

Still on the fence? Read the free sample first. I’ll wait. 😄

Who it’s for

You got the role by being the best in the room. You’re the calm one in every meeting, the one who sees the holes in the plan, the one everyone counts on to hold it together. And some days you wonder if you climbed the wrong mountain.

This book is for you. (Also for anyone who has ever stared at an obstacle and thought, “Well. That’s a problem.”)

What early readers are saying ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

“The combination of actionable wisdom and intellectual humility in Read The Terrain makes it one of the best management books I’ve read.”
Dallas Jones

“Most leadership books read well and are hard to apply. This is not one of them.”
Dan Kasper

“Laura starts the conversation—and as a reader, we can all call shotgun!”
Dr. Pamela Rabin

Three small favors that make a HUGE difference

1. Buy a copy. Or two! Leaders you love make excellent gift recipients, and the holidays are coming up fast.

2. Share it. Forward this email. Post the link. Hand it to the calm one in your life who is holding everything together.

3. Leave a review. A sentence or two is plenty. Reviews are how a book finds readers who have never heard of me, so yours carries a lot of weight. Post it on Goodreads, Amazon, or wherever you bought it.

Thank you for being on this trail with me. Every share, every review, every copy in someone’s hands means the world. 🙌

Force fails. Reading wins.

Laura

Nobody asked me to do this. One of our rigs had come out of the crossing at Monache Meadows minus its license plate, and the plate was sitting somewhere in water that was knee-high and cold enough to make you rethink your life. So I volunteered, because I’m the person who volunteers. I changed into shorts, waded in, and made it almost to the middle, every step a negotiation with my own shins, when one of the drivers rolled his rig into the river, leaned out the door, and plucked the plate out of the water like he was grabbing the mail.

There were a dozen of us that weekend from the So Cal Rover Club. Some are friends. Some I’d never run with before, which is one way to get to know people (I recommend a less frigid one).

There should have been more of us. The week before the trip the weather was HOT, around a hundred degrees, then the forecast turned to rain and cold, and a few people canceled. They thought the trail could get unruly and that it was more than they wanted to take on. That’s a fair call.

But the rain never came. The trees had turned, the river was running, and it was the kind of weekend you try to describe afterward and end up showing people pictures instead.

Two rigs still overheated, coolant both times. Both times the group did what this group does: gathered around an open hood and improvised until it worked. Both rigs made it home.

I wasn’t the fix for any of it. I was the one with the camera, yelling “woohoo, you’ve got this, isn’t this fun” at people working their way over ruts, taking pictures while somebody else figured out a cooling system. I loved it. I loved not being the one.

I also spent more of the weekend than I’d like to admit fighting the urge to step in. Not because anything was wrong, but because people were doing things differently than I would have. Everything was fine. I was having a great time. And part of me was still standing at the edge of the river, waiting for my turn to fix it.

Maybe that’s what the plate was about. I waded in to solve it my way; someone else solved it from the driver’s seat, and the plate came back either way.

I’ve thought a lot this week about the people who stayed home. Not because they were wrong, but because they made the call off the forecast, and the forecast turned out to describe a different weekend than the one we got. Leaders do this constantly. We decide off the projection, the rumor, how it went last time. And when a hard week follows a decision we did make, we treat the hard week as the verdict. Two breakdowns didn’t mean we shouldn’t have gone. They were part of going.

“A good leader reads the situation they’re actually in, not the one they remember.”
From Read the Terrain, Chapter 5

Try this week

Find one decision you’re making off a forecast: a projection, a prediction about how someone will react, how it went last year. Write down what you’d need to see to know the real conditions.

1. Go look. Have one conversation, do one walk-through, or ask the one question you’ve been assuming you already know the answer to.

2. If something goes sideways on a call you already made, ask before you retreat: did the decision fail, or did the terrain do what terrain does?

3. The next time someone handles something differently than you would, ask yourself one question before you step in: is it wrong, or is it not how I’d do it? If it’s the second, keep your hands off the wheel.

A question

What are you staying home from because of a forecast?

I turned this weekend into a three-part video series on Instagram and YouTube: the people who stayed home, the breakdowns, and why my job was the camera.

The Book

Read the Terrain: Leadership Under Real Conditions is built on this kind of reading: name the pattern you’re stuck in, then do something about it on Monday. Paperback and ebook come out November 2, and the Kindle preorder is open now.

Get the book

I had read that line. I had a plan for it.

The plan was fine right up until it met the rock.

That’s the humbling part of off-road driving. You can study a line, feel sure about it, and still be wrong, because what you see from the driver’s seat isn’t the whole picture.

Leading works the same way. We look at a decision, it seems straightforward, and we commit. If we’re clear about where we’re trying to go, we tend to notice sooner when something drifts. If we aren’t, whatever is easiest to follow becomes the plan, and we often don’t notice until we hear the thud.

I’ve had that on my mind this month because of a school board in Maryland.

Straightforward, Then the Thud

This fall, Frederick County Public Schools switched on Google Gemini for middle and high school students. The rule was that students could use it only when a teacher allowed it. According to the Frederick News-Post, officials chose it because it was the only tool they evaluated that cleared the state’s safety and privacy standards.

By the Sept. 9 board meeting, teachers were saying they couldn’t turn it off, and parents hadn’t been told it was coming. A new state law gave the board until Oct. 22 to adopt an AI policy. On Oct. 7 the board voted 6-1 to reverse all of it and ban student AI use from pre-K through 12th grade (FOX 5 DC).

None of that looks careless to me. A tool that passed the state’s review, on a platform the district already trusted, with a deadline closing in. Most of us would have looked at that line and thought it seemed pretty straightforward.

So I’m not reading this as a story about Frederick. I’m reading it as a story about the rest of us.

Allowed, Not Aimed

I’m working from news coverage here. I wasn’t in those meetings, and plenty was surely said that never made the paper. So I am making assumptions here, but…

Gemini was chosen because it cleared the privacy bar. That matters. But a review tells you something is allowed. It doesn’t tell you what it’s for, and under a deadline, that second conversation is the easiest one to skip.

When it gets skipped, other things fill in the answer: the platform’s settings, the calendar, whoever raises a concern first. The people closest to the work learn what the decision meant by living with it. It happens with a new meeting template, a different scheduling tool or a change to how expense reports get approved as easily as with AI.

Four Questions, Turned Inward

I bring four questions into most AI conversations I’m part of. Reading Frederick through them, I noticed none of them is about technology. They’re about whether the people making the call know what they’re trying to do.

1. What is it for? Frederick’s stated purpose was “primarily” AI literacy. The rollout put Gemini inside the apps students do their schoolwork in, and people went by what they saw on their screens. How often do my stated purpose and my rollout point in different directions? Would I catch it?

2. What does it strengthen? This is the one that tends to vanish as a deadline gets close. It’s also the answer you’ll want most when the first concerns arrive.

3. What does it replace? A writing assistant inside the document where a student writes lands on top of that student’s first attempt, the messy part where a lot of the learning happens. The board saw that. The question for the rest of us is whether we see our version of it before launch or after.

4. What does it make too easy to do poorly, and what will we do about it? In Frederick, teachers were supposed to decide when students could use the tool, but they had no way to switch it off. Before I make anyone responsible for a guardrail, I want to know they can reach it.

What this means

I’m not interested in grading Frederick’s board. They made a hard call under real pressure. The pattern is the part worth naming: when nobody says out loud what a decision is for, the defaults decide, and a no can skip that step as easily as a yes. The ban still allows lessons about AI, which is close to what the district said Gemini was for in the first place. Maybe the purpose was sound all along. It never got said clearly enough, early enough, to steer anything.

That’s the ground Read the Terrain covers: reading conditions before acting, and getting out of the truck before you commit to the line.

Now for the ask.

If this one landed, the book goes further down the same trail. Preorders help a new book more than almost anything else, so if you’re planning to read it, now is the time.

Pre-Order the Book

This week’s question:

This week’s question: What’s one decision you made because it was allowed, without ever saying out loud what it was for?

[Normal text, italic, in parentheses] (optional) Next up: a teaser for the follow-up piece.

P.S. The bumper still has the scar from that rock. I’ve decided it stays.

I also told you about the version of that reach I catch at work. With our new upper leadership, my delegation sometimes sounds like this: do this, in this way.

Today is about what to do with that.

Two versions of the same reach

The reflex shows up in two forms. In the first, you keep the task. You’re good at it, you’re faster at it, and you’re already halfway onto the dryer before anyone else moves.

In the second, you hand the task off with the method attached. It looks like delegation. It has a name on it and a due date. But the person on the other end is carrying out your plan, and the thinking never left your desk.

Both forms end in done. That’s why they’re so hard to see as a problem. The task gets finished, often well, and you move to the next one.

There’s a third option. You work it with the person. You stay in the problem together long enough to hear how they’d approach it. It’s slower, it takes more talking, and when you’re in a hurry to be done, it tends to disappear from the list entirely.

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Why capable leaders skip the third option

If you’re good at something, doing it yourself is almost always faster in the moment. That speed pays you back right away. Whatever the other person would have learned, or shown you about how they think, pays back later and in ways you won’t trace to that one moment.

So the reflex keeps winning. It wins in the laundry room, and it wins in the leadership meeting.

The fix is a pause, short enough to fit in the time it takes to climb onto a dryer. Four questions.

Read more

My youngest daughter, Jordan, was moving into her first home, and I flew across the country to help. I didn’t realize installing her washer and dryer would be part of the trip. But her laundry was stacking up, and it needed to be done.

The machines were in place. The last job was fishing the cord up from the gap between the dryer and the wall. Jordan offered to grab it.

By then I was already mid-flight. Stomach flat across the top of the machine, both arms down the back, bare feet braced against the door frame behind me for leverage. She took a picture.

(It's a good picture. The neon stripes on my sweatpants are doing a lot of work.)

Jordan is young. She could have reached that cord from a more dignified angle.

Where the habit came from

Jordan has told me she remembers watching me do this kind of thing on my own when she was growing up. She tells her friends I can put IKEA furniture together solo. She says it with some pride, and I’ll take it.

She’s right about the history. I was a single mom. There was nobody else to hold the other end of the bookshelf, so I learned to hold both ends. I learned hardware and hookups and those wordless instruction booklets, because the alternative was going without. That self-reliance got us through. I’m proud of it too.

But I have a choice now. I have a husband. Friends. Co-workers. A grown daughter standing two feet away, offering. And here I am in my fifties, draped over a dryer.

It didn't occur to me

The honest part is that I never decided against asking. It didn’t occur to me. I just wanted the chore done so I could move on, and the fastest path to done ran straight through my own two arms.

That’s what a habit built under pressure does. It skips the step where you look around. When you spend years as the only person available, your body learns to go before your head checks who else is in the room. The conditions changed a long time ago. The reflex kept running.

And I wrote the chapter. Chapter 3 of my book is called Let Them Drive. It’s about the urge to hand people the answer instead of letting them build their own knowledge, and how that urge feels like generosity while it keeps them dependent on you. Jordan offered to drive, but I had the wheel before the offer registered.

The same reflex at work

We have new leadership where I work. I’ve caught myself, more than once, wanting to delegate things to them when what the moment called for was working it through with them. And when I delegate, it’s specific. Do this, in this way.

On the surface that looks like the opposite of the dryer. I’m giving the work away instead of keeping it. Underneath, it’s the same move. When I hand over the task along with exactly how to do it, the thinking stays with me. Someone else’s arms go behind the dryer, and I’m still the one deciding where they reach.

That’s the answer reflex again. Handing people the method feels like clarity. It also means they never get to show me how they’d approach it, so I never find out.

Doing it myself and handing it off with instructions are both ways to finish. Collaborating means staying in it with someone, which takes longer and involves more talking, and when I’m in a hurry to be done, that’s the option my brain skips.

With new leaders, that’s the option that matters most. We’re still learning how each other thinks, and that learning happens in the shared work, in the back-and-forth where you find out how the other person sees a problem. So I keep having to check my own compass. Am I handing this over because it belongs to them, or because I want it off my desk?

Finishing isn't the only way to be done

The critical distinction here is between finishing and sharing. Finishing gets the task off your plate, and you can do it alone or by passing it away. Sharing keeps you in the work alongside someone. It’s slower. It’s the only version where anyone learns anything about anyone else.

The people around you notice which one you pick. Jordan grew up watching me do it alone, and she learned I could. I’d like her to also get to experience my joy watching her do it.

Your team is watching the same way. Every time you reach past them, they learn you’ve got it covered. Eventually they stop offering.

Now for the ask.

If this one sounded familiar, the book goes further into it. Read the Terrain is up for Kindle pre-order now, ahead of the November 2 launch.

Pre-Order on Amazon

And this week’s question:

What’s one thing you’re still doing alone because you once had to?

Hit reply and tell me. I read every one.

Laura

Leave a comment

Then today, a woman I have never met messaged me. She said she’d like to be an advance reader. She’d like to read it.

That was enough. Someone with no connection to me raised her hand for my work. And somewhere in that conversation, I thought about a meeting from months ago.

I was on the invite as optional. It wasn’t my meeting. When I’m optional, I try hard not to step on the people running the room. It was a brainstorming session, the kind where a project gets built out loud. Ideas were flying. People grabbed them, added to them, tossed them back.

Then a staff member shared hers. She had less title and less experience than most of the people in that meeting.

The response was some version of “Oh, that’s cool...” and then, “So anyway.”

Nobody argued with her. Nobody said no. The conversation stepped over her idea and kept going.

In hindsight, part of the problem may have been me. I think the organizers were posturing a little for the person with the bigger title in the room. The leaders’ ideas got picked up. Hers got polite noise.

And I sat there and said nothing.

Chapter 1 of my book is called The Passenger Seat. The subtitle is When Staying Quiet Stops Being Humble and Starts Being a Decision. I wrote that chapter. Then I sat in that meeting and rode along anyway.

Who Gets Picked Up

Attention follows standing. My post had years of relationships and a title behind it, and people showed up. Her idea had neither behind it in that room, and people moved on.

Acknowledging an idea is easy. “Oh, that’s cool” is acknowledgment. It’s polite, and it lets everyone keep moving. Picking an idea up takes one more step. You stop long enough to look at it. You ask her to say it again. You let the room sit with it before anyone decides what it’s worth.

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Her idea probably deserved the most time that day, because she wasn’t looking at the project through the same years the rest of us were.

And the person who can pick an idea up most easily is usually the one with the most standing in the room. That day, it was me.

If I could go back, I know what I’d say. “Hold up. Can you repeat that idea so we can sit with it, please?”

One sentence. It stops the room for a moment and puts her idea back on the table.

You’ve probably been in that meeting. Maybe you’ve been her. Maybe you’ve been the one with the title, sitting quietly because it wasn’t your meeting.

This essay is step one for me. I’m writing it the same day it clicked. The book comes out November 2, and it comes from the same place as this essay: I’m still figuring this out, in real time, in rooms where I should know better.

A question for you

Whose idea did you let go by this week? And what would it have cost you to say, “Hold up”?

And if you want to get more info on the book, do so here: https://laurakspencer.com/thebook/

Share Read the Terrain

(That sentence makes me happier than it probably should.)

Our club puts on Rover Rendezvous once a year. We reserved an entire campground, and the weekend ran on camaraderie and campfire stories. On Saturday, John and I took on White Mountain, a trail rated moderate to difficult.

I’m not fully comfortable on difficult trails yet. So when things got serious, John took the wheel.

Things got most serious at the big hill climb. It’s steep and technical, and a spotter named Keith was working it, moving rocks for some rigs and showing drivers where to go. We were second to last up the hill.

There’s a running joke that when John drives, spotters give up early. Keith gave him one quick signal, a little to the left, then dropped his hands and waved us through. We made it up. It went like that the whole day. We never needed a spotter.

Plenty of other drivers needed Keith, and that says nothing bad about them. Every driver brings a different comfort level, and every rig brings different capabilities.

I made my call back at the trailhead. I knew where my skill ran out on that trail, and I knew John’s didn’t run out there.

Which is a little ironic, because I’ve written a book about leadership, and its first chapter is called “The Passenger Seat.” That chapter is focused on the people sitting in it. It’s about leaders who drift, going along with decisions because staying quiet feels easier than choosing.

On Saturday, I rode in the passenger seat on purpose.

Choice and drift can put you in the same seat. What matters is whether you decided to be there. Part of leadership is knowing when to trust someone else to lead, and making that call with clear eyes.

That’s what the whole book is about: seeing the ground you’re actually standing on before you commit people to it.

Read the Terrain: Leadership Under Real Conditions launches November 2.

Now for the ask.

I’m looking for 15 to 20 advance readers. (Thirty would make my year, but I’m trying to be a grown-up about this.)

If you raise your hand, you’ll get an ePub copy of the book next week. It runs about 150 pages, so think a few evenings with a cup of coffee. I’ll check in with you in mid-October to see how the reading is going.

What I’m hoping for in return is an honest review on Amazon, Goodreads, or both, ideally during launch week (November 2 to 9), and no later than mid-November. Honest means honest. If a chapter didn’t work for you, say so. That’s more useful to me (and to the next reader) than five polite stars…even though I do love stars.

To join, fill out this short form by Sept 30: Book Launch Page

Oh, and here’s my question for you this week: where are you sitting in the passenger seat right now, and did you choose it?

P.S. White Mountain has its own chapter in the book. The last time I wrote about that trail, the day ended with a two-vehicle winch and a sidewall caught on a rock. (This weekend went better.) Advance readers get the whole story first: https://forms.gle/xwjrCJjzLrV5yHNz7

Twenty-five years ago was around 2001. We had indestructible Nokia brick cell phones and T9 texting, but carrying a phone was an entirely different experience of reality. A phone was an appliance. You hoarded your minutes until 9:00 PM when they were free. When you finished a call, you put the phone back in your purse. You lived with long stretches of quiet and the simple grace of not knowing where everyone was every second of the day.

As I looked at the distance between that tactile world and this one, I wrote:

We are the last of the non-digital.

The irony was sitting right there in my thumbs. We were two people marveling at the lost beauty of an untethered existence, yet our reflection was mediated entirely through glowing glass rectangles and cell towers.

We are not living in that analog world anymore, and pretending we can retreat into it is a fantasy. But as modern technology expands at a velocity that outpaces our ability to metabolize it, we have created an environment of profound cognitive dissonance that leaves our newest generation of workers stranded between our unexamined assumptions and our outdated institutions.

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The Consumer Trap

For the past fifteen years or so, most organizational leaders have operated under a comfortable myth: Because younger workers grew up with screens, they must be digitally fluent.

We assume that living inside an ecosystem means knowing how it works. The generation entering the workforce today was handed consumer technology engineered to be entirely frictionless. Apple, under Steve Jobs, spent billions ensuring that users would never have to see a command line, manage a local file directory, understand a data protocol, or troubleshoot an operating system. Modern interfaces are designed to keep people inside walled gardens where every gesture is measured, predicted, and monetized.

These young adults did not fail to learn systems architecture; they were insulated from it. They were handed slot machines, not flight simulators.

By contrast, my generation had to understand how the machine functioned just to make it run. To get online in 1996, when I bought my first Gateway PC, I had to configure hardware, diagnose connection failures, and understand where files lived on a physical drive. That frustrating friction built a durable mental model of systems logic.

When we call modern young adults “digital natives,” we flatter ourselves into thinking we gave them a head start. In reality, we gave them black boxes they were never taught to take apart.

The Industrial Hangover

This deficit hits an immediate dead end in workplaces still nursing an industrial hangover.

Knowledge work remains organized around the factory clock. We pay people by the hour and evaluate performance by visible seat time. The entire system rewards friction: typing out emails keystroke by keystroke, manually reformatting spreadsheets, and spending full days on clerical busywork that signals value.

When modern tools make it possible to compress an eight-hour clerical backlog into twenty minutes of high-level synthesis, legacy management structures freeze. If an organization measures value by elapsed time, high-leverage work looks like cutting corners, and spending all day on administrative minutiae looks like dedication.

The whole setup makes no sense. In school, using modern tools is treated like cheating, and students are rewarded for taking the longest, slowest path possible. Then they enter the workforce, where bosses assume they are computer geniuses, offer zero training, and quietly punish them for finishing early because the company still pays by the hour. We expect young people to survive the wild west of modern tech while judging them on old factory habits.

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A Two-Way Street

It is easy for older generations to slip into a tired routine: rolling our eyes at screen habits or grumbling when an entry-level worker cannot find a document saved to their own drive. You know the drill…

But that critique misses the mark entirely.

If this exchange only flows in one direction, it isn’t leadership; it’s just a tired lecture. And the generation coming up behind us has plenty to teach us about the reality of living inside the machine.

They have a better built-in BS detector than any generation before them. After spending their entire lives swimming through targeted ads, sponsored content, and algorithmic sales pitches, they can spot performative nonsense from a mile away. When they push back against sitting in an office chair for eight hours just to look busy, they aren’t being lazy. They just refuse to play along with an obvious charade. In the process, they force the rest of us to admit how much time we waste doing things the hard way just to look productive.

They also know firsthand what it feels like to spend their formative years under a digital microscope. While older adults study screen addiction and tech habits from a safe, theoretical distance, younger people have lived the constant stress of being watched, scored, and recorded since middle school. They know where the water is toxic because they grew up swimming in it.

The real goal is not to lecture them about how great life was before the internet, nor is it to throw up our hands and let phone apps run the workplace. The real work is meeting in the middle. We need to throw out the obsolete factory habits that waste their time, pull back the curtain on how modern software actually works under the hood, and build an environment that values real human insight over mindless busywork.

Yet if the cost of this dissonance is so clear, why are we so stubbornly terrified of engaging with it?

Why do school boards, corporate policies, and community leaders cling so desperately to magnetic pouches, digital firewalls, and total prohibition?

To understand that, we have to look directly at our own generation: at the grief, the fear of obsolescence, and the quiet panic of being the last people who remember what the world felt like before the lights were turned on.

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(Next up in Part 2: The Psychology of the Pouch: why we retreat into prohibition, the realities of synthetic information warfare, and how to build cognitive firewalls instead of locked gates.)

I used the word mandate. Out loud. More than once. As if saying it harder would make it happen faster.

What I didn’t do was look at who was in front of me. Some of those teachers were a few years from retirement and had long since made their peace with letting technology pass them by. Others were spending every ounce they had teaching five-year-olds to read, which does not leave a lot over for learning to build a webpage. None of that slowed me down. I had a plan and a timeline, and I pressed.

The superintendent said it kindly, which somehow made it land harder. You are pulling a rubber band, he told me. Far and fast. A rubber band pulled that way snaps. Tug it a little at a time and it stretches, it accommodates, it will hold far more tension than you’d think. But only if you let it adjust to each new length before you ask for more.

That was the day I struck the word mandate from my vocabulary. I have not used it since.

I’ve been writing here for a while about what happens when leaders start managing how things look instead of reading what is actually in front of them. Those essays were not practice for something else. They were the book showing up in pieces, before I was willing to say the word book out loud.

So. Read the Terrain: Leadership Under Real Conditions. Coming this winter.

Eleven patterns. Passenger-seat leadership. The applause trap. The load-bearing leader. Each one is something you can already feel and have never had words for, which is the whole point of naming them. You cannot interrupt a pattern you cannot see.

There are no borrowed frameworks in it. No research citations, no expert I’m quoting to make the argument for me. Everything in it either happened to me or happened in front of me, and a fair amount of it is me getting it wrong first. There’s a chapter about the day I lost a job for saying the thing out loud. There’s a chapter about a hill climb in Last Chance Canyon, where I had two ways up and picked the harder one rather than admit in front of the group that I was out of my depth. (The Rover had opinions about that. So did the radio, which I ignored.)

If you are the calmest person in a meeting that is on fire and also the most alone in it, I wrote this for you. If everyone leans on you and nobody holds you steady, same.

Why I’m telling you before I’m ready

The whole book is my attempt to not pull the rubber band too tight, too fast, on people who are growing into their own leadership. Which would be a strange thing to write and then hand you as a finished, perfect object with a countdown clock attached.

So you get the middle. The proof copy that comes back with errors in it. The cover I’ve looked at so many times I can no longer tell if it’s good. That part is more useful to you than the polished announcement would be, and it’s more honest about how any of this actually gets made.

There’s a page now: laurakspencer.com/thebook

Sign up there and you’ll get the cover before it goes anywhere else, the release date the day I actually have one, and a shot at the early reader team. (That last one means a free copy in October and a small favor asked of you in November. I’ll explain when we get closer.)

That’s the whole ask. No preorder, no launch team energy. Just tell me you want to know.

A question for you

Where are you pulling the rubber band right now? Not whether you’re pulling. How fast.

Reply and tell me. I read all of them, and I’d bet money at least one of you names a pattern I missed.

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I keep blocking gray rectangles on the fall calendar for things that do not exist. No agenda, no title, just a hard border drawn against October. A placeholder for a breath I have not figured out how to take yet.

For longer than I want to admit, I measured my life by how much I could carry without visibly shaking. A good week was a heavy week where nothing dropped. Stack the boxes high enough and exhaustion starts to feel like purpose. It is a seductive trap because people praise you for it. They watch you hold the roof up with one hand and they say, I don’t know how you do it. And I would smile, and my shoulder would keep giving out where nobody could see it.

The tally I keep now is different, and a lot less flattering.

I count how many decisions had to come through me. Not the visionary work that goes in slide decks. The low-grade friction of everyone waiting on a nod, a sign-off, a “Did I do good, boss?” When that number spikes, I have stopped calling it a busy season. A busy season implies weather. Something that blew in off the coast that I just have to wait out under an umbrella (which doesn’t happen to often in So Cal).

It is not weather. It is architecture. I built it, usually out of an unexamined instinct that if I let go of the wheel for twelve seconds the whole thing ends up in the ditch.

Looking at that number honestly the first time was like catching my reflection in a dark window before I was ready for it. The impulse is to fix it fast. Write a few brisk emails, hand off three projects, call it delegation. Real handoffs do not work like that. It’s taking a lot of time. Some things are becoming clumsier in the process while they find new definition because they missed nuance I spent ten years learning the hard way.

That middle stretch, where the work is worse than what I would have done and I am not allowed to reach in and take it back, is close to unbearable. It takes everything I have not to grab it out of their hands. But if I sit still long enough, something else happens. It comes back better. Different, sharper, not mine anymore. And in the process, they get to develop their own nuance and experienced ways.

Most of what I want from my work right now is not an addition. Not a bigger stage, a larger team, another project with my name on it. It is an absence.

I want a list of things that stop happening.

Fewer calls I replay at two in the morning, dissecting my own tone. Fewer moments where I hold whatever I am actually feeling so I can be the steadiest nervous system in the room, because the room is brittle and needs an anchor. There is a specific kind of tired that comes from being everyone’s shock absorber. I did not notice how much of the road I had taken into my own bones until I tried to sit still.

I don’t have a clean lesson here to give you. No three-step framework for reclaiming my time, or whatever we are calling it now.

I just have gray blocks sitting on the screen for mid-October, and a question I have not answered:

Am I worn out by the terrain of this particular year, or have I outgrown the shape of the container I built?

I don’t know yet.

Where does that land for you?

Except nobody remembers a policy manual when the school year actually hits.

The stuff that actually holds a school together, the stuff that keeps kids safe, keeps families enrolled, and builds real trust, happens in tiny, unscripted moments. It’s a teacher’s voice on a first call home. It’s how someone speaks to a kid in a crowded hallway. It’s whether a nervous parent feels heard or just processed when they try to navigate the system.

If you want a school year that actually works, stop optimizing for transactional task lists. Start building for real human connection.

1. Tone Sets the Climate; Leaders Set the Standard

Basic customer service in a school is transactional. It’s passing out a syllabus, grading a quiz, or logging attendance. Hospitality, though? That’s transformational. It’s the deliberate effort to make every student, parent, and coworker feel seen and valued.

Good leaders don’t just dump a bucket of compliance tasks on their staff during kickoff week. They get their teams to look closely at tone. They test out how the exact same sentence hits differently depending on the warmth behind it, and they map out how people should actually feel during an interaction. Tone isn’t something that just happens by accident. It’s a choice your organization makes.

2. Anchoring Promises: The Core Non-Negotiables

If you don't want your culture to end up as a cheesy poster in the breakroom, your team has to build non-negotiables out of real empathy. Skip the rigid, top-down rules. Successful teams make promises anchored in human impact:

“Because we want our families to feel [Value], we will [Action].”

When teachers and staff write their own commitments from a place of empathy, you don't have to police compliance. It happens naturally because people are driven by purpose instead of policy.

3. Operationalizing “The Connected Moment”

Culture lives or dies in your daily operations. Every team, whether they’re teaching math, running special ed, or working the front office, has specific touchpoints with kids and parents.

A connection-first launch makes teams zoom in on their single most important touchpoint. We call this their Connected Moment. They take that moment and completely redesign it. When you turn a routine onboarding call, an academic check-in, or a basic email into a high-touch, human connection, it changes the entire trajectory of your year.

Building a Connection-First Culture

You can't expect teachers to build connection-first classrooms if you aren't running a connection-first organization. When you front-load your school year with culture, curiosity, and genuine hospitality, you build up a relational bank account that keeps your team afloat when the year gets tough.

Tasks tell people what to do. Hospitality reminds them why it matters.

If you are an educational leader looking to reimagine your staff launch, shift your culture toward radical connection, or operationalize hospitality across your teams, feel free to reach out—I love partnering with schools to design transformational experiences.

Sandstone Canyon is easy to miss if you’re moving too fast. It branches off Fish Creek Wash without much announcement. A sign. A turn. If you weren’t already in the mood to slow down, you’d keep going.

Once you’re inside, the walls come up quickly. Fifty feet, maybe seventy. The floor is still sand and crushed dirt, still nothing anyone would call technical, but there isn’t much extra room. You notice that right away. The way the canyon quietly narrows your choices.

We’re used to places that reward momentum. Sandstone doesn’t. It asks you to pay attention, and not just in the don’t-hit-anything sense. This is a canyon that took millions of years to become a canyon. The walls hold light differently depending on the hour. The color shifts as you move. If you’re only focused on getting to the end, you miss almost everything that’s actually there.

Every so often you have to wait for someone coming the other way, or ease past a narrow stretch. That part isn’t hard. It just makes it very clear that you don’t get to set the pace.

Most days, you think you do.

The speed I was rewarding

For years I ran my days as a queue. Clear the thing, clear the next thing, feel the small hit of finishing, move on. It felt efficient. Over time it just became automatic. Automatic looks like efficient from the outside. It is not the same thing.

I rewarded it in other people too. The fast reply. The closed loop. The person who kept things moving. I was measuring pace because pace was easy to see. Attention is harder to see. It doesn’t show up in a status update.

And living at that speed flattens things. Even good weeks start to feel thin. You get through a lot. You notice almost none of it.

What the canyon insists on

Out in Sandstone that speed is harder to keep. The canyon keeps interrupting you. The walls keep catching the light. The scale of it keeps insisting that you are moving through something that does not care how quickly you want to reach the end.

Most of the leadership work I actually care about behaves the same way. The conversation that changes something. The person who has quietly stalled and is waiting to see if anyone notices. The pattern under the pattern. None of it survives being rushed. You can process it fast. You cannot see it fast.

One of my standing questions about any tool or habit is what it makes too easy to do poorly. Speed makes attention too easy to skip. You can run at that pace for a long time and call it leadership, right up until you miss the thing that mattered.

The pace was never mine to set

You leave the canyon, of course. You always do. You go back to regular weeks and the usual noise, and slowly you start moving too fast again. Until the next place makes you notice.

The work does the same thing, if you let it. It narrows. It catches the light. It refuses to be hurried. The pace was never yours to set. The only choice was whether you were going to pay attention while it set it for you.

A question for you

What have you been trying to get through lately, that might actually be asking you to slow down and look?

Hit reply and tell me what you saw once you stopped moving.
I read every one.

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Then he said it. “We never lose. We either win, or we learn.”

I wrote it down fast. Then I sat with it on the drive home and the second thought showed up, the one that usually does. I have seen that line before. It is on a mug somewhere. I wrote it down anyway, which tells you something about how good it feels to hear.

The mug leaves off the important part.

A loss does not teach you anything on its own. It just sits there. Raw material. Someone has to convert it, and that conversion has a price. The debrief nobody schedules. The honest question about who dropped what. The willingness to say the plan was wrong and not just unlucky. That is the work. It is boring, it is expensive, and most of us skip it.

So the team loses. Everyone gathers. Somebody says a version of “well, we learned a lot from this.” Heads nod. It feels like a lesson. Then Monday arrives and nothing is different. The words did the emotional work of learning without any of the actual work. Everyone feels resolved. Nothing changed.

The rollout I was sure of

Years back I was Executive Director of Innovation for a district. Big role. A real step up, and I was eager to show I could do things with it. My team got handed a job I was sure of. Move parents off their idea of what school was for and toward the thing we all knew was coming. Collaboration. Design thinking. Executive functioning.

Our parents had done everything right. Lawyers. Doctors. People for whom school had been a clean staircase to a good life. We were asking them to trade the staircase for something they could not picture yet.

We built the whole rollout. Parent sessions. Workshops. A sequence, a timeline, the works. Good on paper.

It did not take. And slowly the admin drifted back to what they had always done. Past practice, quietly restored, like the initiative had never happened.

Not enough buy-in, I said.

That diagnosis cost me nothing. It put the failure on the parents. It let me keep the plan, keep the theory, and keep the version of myself who had run a smart rollout that other people were not ready for.

The lesson I did not pay for was harder. I had aimed a persuasion campaign at a belief that had personally made every one of those parents successful. No workshop out-argues a life that worked. And I was so eager to prove I belonged in the role that I mistook my own certainty for a plan. I felt the loss. I named it something that let me off the hook. Then I moved on and changed nothing, and the admin sliding back to old habits was the proof.

There is a quieter version of the same move. Sometimes we reach for “we learned” so we do not have to sit in the loss at all. You lost. You are allowed to say that first. The learning does not start until you stop reaching for the reframe.

The bill comes either way

A loss does not make you wiser. It hands you an invoice. The lesson is whatever you are willing to pay for it afterward, in time and in honesty, and the first explanation you reach for is usually the one that keeps you comfortable. Next time your team says it learned a lot, ask who the explanation protects. Then ask what is different on Monday.

A question for you

Think of the last real loss your team took. What actually changed after it, and what just got called a lesson?

Reply and tell me. I read every one.
Thursday, the paid companion turns this into a debrief you can actually run.

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Point true north, he said, or something close to it. I don’t remember the exact words because my memory is shot. But I do remember thinking it was a cool thing to hand someone, and I remember, years later, understanding why it was the thing he chose to give me. He gave me the compass because he couldn’t give me a career’s worth of experience. (This was long before I ever wrote a word about reading terrain, by the way. Funny how the universe works…)

There’s a quote I have seen so many times in leadership blogs and Instagram quote accounts: Success leaves clues. Study the people who made it, find what they did, do that. It sounds so smart because it is half of a true thing. The half it leaves out is the part that I think matters more

The Clarity Was Not a Technique

My boss led with clarity and integrity, and when I was new I tried to figure out how he did it. I studied his every move. His presentation style; his email tone; and the way he walked in to a room. I even watched how he ran a hard conversation and tried to copy the moves.

I could not copy it. Not because I wasn’t paying attention, but because the thing I was trying to copy wasn’t a technique. It was a residue. His clarity was built off of thirty years of mistakes wearing a clean shirt, and I did not have the mistakes yet. If I had successfully copied the output, I’d have copied the one thing that couldn’t transfer, because it wasn’t a skill he was performing. It was a scar that had healed a certain way.

Most successful leaders show up polished and let you assume they walked in like that. They present the finished version. The clues are there, technically, but they’re buried under the presentation, because nobody’s incentivized to show you the wound.

My boss did the opposite. That was the rare part, and the part I value so much more than any leadership book or training.

The Empty File

He told me once about a person he couldn’t terminate.

The employee wasn’t able to do the job. My boss knew it, the team knew it, and when he finally moved to let the person go, the union stopped him cold. He didn’t have the paperwork. No documented attempts to counsel, no record of redirection, no file showing he’d tried to bring the person along before giving up on them. The file was empty. So the person stayed, and the mission carried the cost of it, for a long time.

That was the wound.

And it explained something I’d felt without understanding. He had no hesitation about hard conversations with me. He’d tell me straight when I was getting something wrong, and I got a lot wrong that first year. After all, I was a new leader making rookie mistakes at a respectable clip, so he had material to work with. But it never felt like a reprimand. It felt like he wanted me inside the success of the thing we were building, and he was clear that this was the reason.

I understand now that his directness wasn’t a personality trait. He wasn’t born unafraid of conflict. He’d once been conflict-avoidant enough to leave a file empty, and it had cost him a person he couldn’t remove and a mission that dragged. The grace he brought to a hard conversation was scar tissue over that exact place. He talked to me directly because he knew, in his body, what silence could cost.

That’s the clue. Not his clarity. The empty file underneath it, and the fact that he chose to show me the file.

What He Could Not Hand Me

You cannot give someone your mistakes.

That’s the real limit of success leaves clues. The clue that matters most is usually the one that doesn’t transfer, because it isn’t a move, it’s a mark left by something that already happened to you and hasn’t happened to them yet. He couldn’t hand me the empty file. He couldn’t hand me the years. So he handed me a compass, which is a beautiful object and also, I think, a confession that the most important thing was the one thing he couldn’t pass across.

What he actually gave me wasn’t the direction. It was the permission to make my own scars legible instead of smoothing them over. To leave the clues out where the next person can read them, empty file and all, rather than presenting the clean version and letting them believe I arrived this way.

Success leaves clues only when someone decides to leave them. Most success buries them. He dug his up and set them on the table for me.

A question for you

What is one scar underneath how you lead that you’ve never let anyone see, that would teach the person coming up behind you more than any polished version of you ever could?

Reply and tell me. I read every one.

(Thank you to Claude AI for helping me ground this reflective moment into something tangible for others!)

This is the part where I tell you what to actually say, because “give each group the opposite” is easy to nod at and hard to do at 6pm with a broken bridge and no plan B in sight.

Since the panicker is loud and the shrugger is quiet, leaders tend to spend all our energy calming the noise and none reopening the calm. So let’s discuss both.

The panicker needs a fact, not a feeling

When someone is spiraling, the instinct is to reassure. It will be okay. We’ve got this. Reassurance is a feeling, and a spiraling person cannot hold a feeling. They can hold a fact. “This bridge broke last year too. We fixed it in four hours. Here is the plan B, go run step one.” Specific past. Specific number. Specific next action. You are handing them peor estaba in a form they can actually use.

The shrugger needs a question they cannot answer with “it’s fine”

This is the harder one. So I wrote you a prompt for it.

Read more

So I plan for it. I keep launch day clear. I tell the team ahead of time to have a manual plan B ready, because the bridge is going to do what the bridge does. This is not pessimism. This is simply learning after multiple years of the same appointment.

This year it broke again. I sent the warning, asked for the backup plan, and then heard nothing for hours. So near end of day I sent the question I actually needed answered: do I need to buy five Monster energy drinks because I am fixing this by hand all night, or do we have the bridge working?

The replies came back in two flavors. And they are the whole story.

The panickers

One group was already spiraling. Is it still broken. Oh my gosh. This is bad. Everything is on fire. You know the energy. It fills a thread fast, and it is loud, and it is genuinely convinced the sky is coming down this time.

There is a grandmother saying for these people. A friend of mine grew up in Mexico, and her grandmother used to say peor estaba ... it was worse before. Whatever you are panicking about now, there was a harder version you already survived. For the spiraling group, that phrase is medicine. Dude, it will be fine. We fix this one every year. By tomorrow you will not remember it was broken, because it will not be broken. That is not dismissal. That is perspective handed to someone who has lost theirs.

The shruggers

The other group was calm. Too calm. It is better than last year. That was the whole message. Not, here is what broke and here is the root. Just, it is better than last year, so let us not go digging.

And here is where the same saying flips on you. Peor estaba is medicine for the panicked. For the calm, it is anesthetic. It is better than last year is how a broken thing survives multiple years. It is the reason the bridge is still a manual triage every single launch instead of something we actually fixed. Nobody is upset. That is exactly the problem. The comfort of “at least” becomes the ceiling nobody names.

The part the grandmothers say with a laugh

There is a funnier version of this saying, and it says the quiet part out loud. Peor estaba antes, que ni novio tenía. Roughly, it was worse before, when I did not even have a boyfriend. You say it with a shrug about a mediocre situation you are keeping because the alternative feels worse than settling.

That is the calm group’s real position, said honestly. It is not only that the bridge is better than last year. It is that a broken-but-familiar bridge feels safer than the work of tearing it apart and building something that holds. Better a bad boyfriend than none. Better the process you know than the discomfort of fixing it. “It is better than last year” is often just this, dressed up in a status update.

What the saying is actually for

The saying is a tool, not a temperament. Same five words, two opposite prescriptions, and the leader’s job on launch day is to know which one a person needs.

The panickers need peor estaba poured over them like cold water. It was worse before. You will survive this. Now breathe and fix the thing. The shruggers need the opposite. They need someone to take the comfort away, to say yes, it is better than last year, and we are still going to find out why this bridge breaks on the same day every year. Hand the calm to the panicked. Take the calm from the comfortable. That is the whole move.

Share Read the Terrain

A question for you

Where are you telling yourself “it is better than last year” as a reason to stop looking?

Reply and tell me what your bridge is. I read every one, and I answer.

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It did not happen that fall. It happened over years, and I only saw the shape of it later.

At the start my mother ran everything and my youngest orbited her. Little things first. Biscuits. Basting the turkey. My mother narrated the whole time. My youngest listened more than she cooked.

Then the work started to split. She took over the sides. She started helping plan the oven, which dish went in when so it all came out hot at once. My mother sat down more. Directed from the kitchen table. The questions got fewer.

Then the knee went, and there was no one else at the stove.

Someone sent me a TikTok video about teaching a kid to bake a box cake. First time, the parent does most of it while the child watches. Second time, they split it. Third time, the child bakes it and the parent stays out of the kitchen. Three passes.

The video called it executive functioning. Planning the steps. Holding the sequence. Knowing what goes in the oven before you need it there. A kid learns all of that on a box cake, and the cake is almost incidental.

I have watched leaders skip that same purpose their entire careers. We hand out tasks. We almost never teach the executive function underneath them.

We hand over the cake and call it delegation

Some of us never leave the first pass. It is faster to do it ourselves, and we promise we will teach it properly next quarter. Next quarter we are still holding the spoon.

The rest of us jump straight to the third. Here, you own this now. Good luck. Then we act surprised when it comes out raw in the middle. We gave them the outcome and none of the passes that make the outcome possible.

The middle pass is the slow one. Standing next to someone while they do it worse than you would (and yes, I snatch the spoon back more than I will admit, the same as my mother did at that stove in the beginning). Answering the questions. Letting them ruin one before they get one right. That is the pass that does the teaching, and it is the first thing we cut when we are busy.

What a forced exit reveals

By the time you are pulled out of the kitchen, the teaching is done or it never happened. The exit only tells you which. My youngest was already a cook before the surgery. The surgery just moved up the day I found out.

The real question is a simple one. Does the dinner still happen when you are on the couch with your leg up?

A question for you

When you were last out unexpectedly, sick, traveling, offline, what did your team handle without you, and what fell apart?

Hit reply and tell me. I read every one.

Share Read the Terrain

Most leaders treat this as one problem. There are two.

The first is capability risk. The team cannot function without this person, and that exposure is real whether or not they ever leave.

The second is retention risk. This person has every reason to take the next offer, because the place that relies on them most is the place doing the least with their career.

You cannot fix one by fixing the other. Promote them out of the bind and the hard jobs still come back wrong. Build redundancy and stay silent, and they read it as you quietly arranging their replacement. Both have to move at once.

Run the two-week test first

Before any of the moves below, do this. Picture the person gone for two weeks. Not quit. Just out, no phone.

Write down every task, decision, and judgment call that stalls or routes to someone scrambling. Be honest about the small ones, the “oh, only she knows the trick for that” ones. That list is your dependency map.

(I have been the leader who ran a version of this test with my IT team and then quietly hoped nobody would quit. Hope, it turns out, is a prayer with a spreadsheet attached.)

What the list actually tells you

The list you just wrote looks like proof of how good they are. Read it again. Every line is a place the work lives in one head and nowhere else. That is an audit of how exposed you are, and you have until their next offer to close it.

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