What If We're Leaving Too Little Room for People to Thrive?

I just finished reading Stolen Focus by Johann Hari, and WOW.

It's one of the best-argued books I've read in a long time. The research, the interviews, the discoveries, and the way he challenges some of our deeply held assumptions about attention and focus. I genuinely loved it, and I've been thinking about it ever since.

One of the things it's got me thinking about is children, free play, and the environments we create for people to learn, grow, and thrive.

Yesterday, I took apart my sectional couch to clean underneath it.

My kids came downstairs, saw the couch in pieces, and were amazed.

And somehow, that turned into hours of different games.

This morning, they were on a train somewhere. Two dogs and an owner were involved. I'm still not entirely sure of the logistics.

But here's what I keep thinking about.

I didn't plan an activity. I didn't organize anything or tell them what to play. I was literally cleaning under my couch.

They took what was in front of them and ran with it.

And in the process, they were imagining, negotiating, creating rules, taking on different roles, and figuring things out together. At one point I heard one of them say, "No, don't ask Mom, we can figure this out on our own."

Nobody was directing the experience. They had the time and space to create it themselves.

I get asked fairly often, "How are your kids so well behaved?"

Honestly, we try to be intentional about the environment we're creating for them.

What they're eating. How much time they spend outside. Time at the park, free play, screen time, time with friends, and how much we intervene versus letting them work things out themselves.

Nature is a big one for us. Getting outside, having room to move, explore, and just be. Not every outing needs an activity or an agenda.

We're also aware that our own stress levels affect them. The pace we're moving at, how we're feeling, and the energy we bring into the house all contribute to the environment they're experiencing.

We're not perfect at any of this. Life gets busy. We get stressed. Some days everyone is tired and things don't go particularly well.

But we pay attention.

Because I've noticed that when some of these needs aren't being met, there are often clues in their behaviour.

And rather than looking only at the behaviour itself, I try to look at the bigger picture.

Have they had enough movement and time outside? Have they had opportunities to play freely? Have we all been rushing around too much? Am I bringing my own stress into the room?

Sometimes the answer is simply that they're tired, hungry, or having a difficult day. They're kids. Not everything needs to be explained or fixed.

But I do think there's value in asking what might be contributing to what we're seeing, rather than immediately jumping to how we need to correct it.

We can be so focused on correcting behaviour that we miss the opportunity to understand what the behaviour might be telling us.

That thought has stayed with me, because I think there's a connection here that goes well beyond parenting.

Think about the environments we're creating for children more broadly.

We want them to be curious, creative, resilient, and capable of focusing. Yet so much of their time is structured around what they should be doing, where they should be, and what they should be learning next.

Schools have an incredibly important job to do, and structure matters. But I wonder whether we sometimes underestimate what gets lost when there isn't enough room for children to play freely, explore, and figure things out.

Not everything valuable can be planned as a lesson.

When kids play together, someone gets left out. They have to navigate it.

They disagree about the rules. They have to communicate.

Something doesn't work. They have to figure out another way.

Of course, children need guidance, and there are times when adults absolutely should step in. But there is enormous value in allowing them to work through the ordinary challenges of being together.

These experiences give them opportunities to practise interpersonal skills, problem-solving, frustration tolerance, and negotiation in ways that can't always be replicated by an adult explaining what they should do.

And that brings me to the workplace.

In my work with founders and leadership teams, I often think about the conditions we're creating for people to do their best work.

We want people to take ownership, exercise good judgment, solve problems independently, communicate well, and work through challenges together.

But do our working environments actually give them the opportunity to develop and demonstrate those capabilities?

Or are we stepping in so quickly, directing so much, and filling every available moment that we're leaving very little room for people to figure things out themselves?

If every decision needs the founder's approval, when does the team develop the confidence to make decisions?

If every interpersonal tension gets resolved by a manager, when do people learn to navigate difficult conversations themselves?

If every problem is escalated rather than worked through, how do people develop their own judgment?

We can hold people accountable for their behaviour. We should.

But individual accountability only takes us so far if the environment continues to reinforce the same patterns.

Sometimes, the work isn't about telling people to do better. It's about examining what's happening around them and creating the conditions for something different.

That might mean getting clearer about roles and expectations. It might mean changing how decisions are made, redistributing responsibilities, or helping a team understand and rally around what actually needs to change.

The goal isn't to remove accountability or leave people without support. It's to create an environment where people can take responsibility, exercise judgment, and become more capable over time.

And then there's the question of attention itself.

We live and work in environments full of interruptions, competing demands, and expectations of constant availability.

We're trying to think strategically while responding to messages, solve complex problems between meetings, and make considered decisions while already thinking about the next thing.

We ask people to focus, but how much space do we actually give them to do it?

We ask people to perform, but are we building in the time and conditions they need to sustain that performance?

I think we also need to talk about rest.

The way we work can be exhausting. We keep adding responsibilities, filling calendars, responding to competing priorities, and trying to squeeze more into the same amount of time.

Then we tell people to be more resilient, manage their stress, and find better ways to cope.

At what point do we question the pace itself?

Children need time to play without being directed. Adults need time when they're not constantly producing, responding, or trying to get ahead.

Not because rest is another productivity hack, but because we're human beings with limits. We need room to recover, explore, think, and simply exist without every moment needing to serve a purpose.

I don't think we can keep asking people to be more focused, more resilient, more independent, and better at working together without questioning whether the environments we've created actually support those things.

This is a big part of what interests me in my work with founders and leadership teams.

Building a capable team isn't just about hiring the right people, setting expectations, and holding people accountable.

It's also about creating an environment where people can develop, exercise judgment, work through challenges, and take ownership. Where not every problem needs to be solved by the person at the top. Where people have enough clarity to act, enough support to learn, and enough room to do the work.

Sometimes good leadership means stepping in.

Sometimes it means stepping back.

And sometimes it means questioning whether the way we've organized things is helping people become more capable, or simply making them more dependent on the system around them.

I'm still thinking about Stolen Focus, and I suspect I'll be thinking about it for a while. And sometimes all it takes is some novelty in a regular day for my kids to invent an entire world.

Two dogs and an owner. A train. Hours of their own ideas.

Maybe they didn't need me to give them something to do.

Maybe they just needed the room to do it themselves. And yes… my couch is still a mess.

What are we asking people to change about themselves when we should also be looking at the environment we've created around them?