A Leader's Strategic Craft: Steering an Ocean We Cannot See
Agency, alignment, embodied emotion, and the leader's craft in a more-than-human age.
In 1980, a young Hawaiian named Nainoa Thompson set out to do something no one from his islands had done in roughly six hundred years. He would guide a double-hulled canoe, the Hōkūleʻa, across 2,500 miles of open Pacific to Tahiti using no compass, no charts, no instruments of any kind. His teacher, a master navigator from the tiny atoll of Satawal named Mau Piailug, had given him a single promise to carry.
"If you can read the ocean," Mau told him, "you will never be lost."
Midway through the voyage, the ocean stopped cooperating. Squalls swallowed the sky for days, and Thompson barely slept. One black night the canoe was racing under heavy wind, and he had no inkling which way it was pointed. No stars. No moon. Just rain, exhaustion, and the growing certainty that he had failed. Then, leaning back against the rail, he stopped straining. A warmth came over him, and though the sky was too black to see anything, he suddenly knew where the moon was. He turned the canoe to match what his body told him. Moments later, the clouds cracked a sliver to let the moon's dazzling brilliance peek through, exactly where he had expected it to be.
That scene is what leadership is becoming as we face a world of rising complexity. Most advice teaches us how to think while we ride the waves of change. This piece asks us to read the ocean beneath them — to trust the uniquely human, affective sense that registers what no dashboard can, and to let it set our heading. The path runs affect first, then reflection, then action. We feel the signal before we interpret it, and we interpret it before we act. That order helps a leader find true direction before paddling back out into the currents that move an organization. Read this way, we stop reacting and bending to conditions. We begin to shape them.
The captain we were trained to be
Most of us were raised on a different image of agency. The captain on the bridge. The lone genius. The decisive individual who surveys the situation, weighs the options, and bends themselves and the world to a plan. We were trained, assessed, and promoted on that model. And many bright professionals are quietly worn down by the effort, like climbing the same tree year after year while suspecting they are a fish built for water.
Thompson was not bending the ocean to his will. He was in a relationship with it. His "knowing" was spread across the swells under the hull, the birds at dawn, the temperature of a rising star, the canoe itself, his crew, and the centuries of ancestors who had read these waters before him. The navigator was one node in a living web of signals. His genius lay in attunement rather than command. That is alignment.
This is the shift posthumanist thinkers have been pointing at for years, and it has arrived at our desks dressed as AI and advanced technologies that shift the locus of agency.
Agency was never only yours
Agency was never ours alone. The word comes from the Latin agere, to set in motion, and we have always pictured a single self doing the moving. That picture is incomplete. Posthumanist scholars ask us to step the human down from sole hero of the story. We share it with a wider cast: decision-making AI, ecosystems, markets, and yes, even the moon. Agency is spread across all of them (Braidotti, 2013). Rosi Braidotti describes the self as something that becomes through its relationships, carried by a shared life-force she calls zoe, rather than a sealed individual issuing orders. Karen Barad takes it further. Agency, for her, is enacted rather than owned. It arises through what she calls intra-actions: reality taking shape in the meeting of people, instruments, and ideas, rather than handed down by any one of them (Barad, 2007).
For a leader, this stopped being philosophy the moment we approved an algorithm to route work, or let a dashboard decide which projects rose to the top. In that moment we hand part of our agency to a non-human actor. The model surfaces some patterns and buries others. It shapes what our people notice, and so what they believe is possible. We are no longer simply steering. We are sailing inside a system that steers with us, and sometimes ahead of us. Agency here is co-created, an intra-action between human and machine.
So the question shifts. It is no longer how to stay in control. It is how to stay aligned. That alignment follows a path — affect first, then reflection, then action — even as agency moves across a mesh that is now both human and machine.
Emotion is the first guidance instrument
Here is where Thompson's felt sense matters.
Braidotti argues that affect is the compass of this distributed life. Joy, energy, and a sense of expansion tell us the life-force is flowing and our power to act is growing. Fatigue, dread, and a creeping numbness tell us the opposite (Braidotti, 2019). Our feelings are doing real navigational work. They are not a bug to be fixed. They are a guidance system.
Professionals are trained to treat emotion as noise to clear away before the "real" analysis begins. That instinct is expensive. The body registers misalignment long before the spreadsheet does. A leader who feels a quiet, persistent dread about a "winning" strategy is reading a true signal, the same way Thompson read the warmth he could not see. The craft is to stop overriding the instrument and start consulting it. Feel first. Then think and reflect. Then act.
Watch the cut you make
Barad gives us one more navigation tool. Every time we name a situation, we draw what she calls an agential cut. It lets us make whole-system decisions from slivers of information. A sliver of a selective lens decides where the boundary sits, what counts as signal and what counts as noise, who is inside the frame and who is left out (Barad, 2007). The cut is never innocent. It quietly produces the reality everyone then operates inside.
On the open water, Thompson drew his own cuts, choosing which swell to trust and which star to steer by. In an AI-saturated organization, those cuts are no longer ours alone. They are drawn with us, by agentic systems that now sit as partners in the decision, not tools we pick up and set down. The system names the metric. The metric names success. Success names who gets promoted and which customer gets ignored. Accept that framing without staying in the decision, and we have let a co-agent make a moral judgment we never consciously joined. Reading the ocean now means reading the partners who read it alongside us.
The human move
None of this dissolves us. It relocates us.
Within this entangled, agentic field, the human still holds a distinctive kind of agency that the psychologist Albert Bandura spent a career describing. We are self-reflective and self-regulating. We can imagine futures, set intentions, and adjust our behavior toward them (Bandura, 2001). We can notice our own affective state, question the story we are telling about a situation, and deliberately choose another course. Bandura called the belief that we can shape outcomes self-efficacy, and decades of research tie it to the actions people take and their resilience when things break (Bandura, 1997).
Here is why affect has to lead. The agentic systems around us are built for reflection as computation. They weigh, they optimize, they draw the cut. What they cannot do is feel what is at stake. And value begins as feeling. Moral psychology bears this out. Jonathan Haidt finds that we reach a moral judgment by intuition first and reasoning afterward, the feeling arriving before the argument that explains it (Haidt, 2001). Antonio Damasio shows that sound judgment depends on emotion, that the body's signals carry information a good decision needs (Damasio, 1994). We sense the wrongness of a thing before we can argue it, and the rightness before we can prove it. Affect comes first, reflection second, action third. If we let the system reason first and we only audit its logic, the moral signal never enters the room. So the leader's irreplaceable move is to feel before the machine finishes thinking, to let the body's read of what matters set the heading, and only then to reflect and act. Alignment through affect is how a human conscience stays inside a co-agentic decision.
That is the wayfinder's real strategic craft. Feeling, interpreting, then choosing, again and again. Neither commanding the sea nor surrendering to it, but aligning the inner to the outer, and steering with full awareness that the voyage is carried by forces larger than the one at the helm: the ocean, the crew, and the agentic systems now sailing beside us.
The wayfinder's practice: five questions for any high-stakes decision
Most leaders walk into consequential decisions armed with goals, strengths, and analysis. Yet the decisions that go wrong rarely fail on logic; they fail on vision, self-awareness, and framing. Before the next consequential decision, work through five questions. Each reframes a familiar question into a sharper one, and together they build vision, agency, alignment, and strategy into the choice itself.
- Vision. Most leaders ask, what is the goal? Ask instead: what will a successful system feel like for the people inside it? Targets describe what you will measure; vision describes what people will experience.
- Agency. Most leaders ask, what are my strengths? Ask instead: where am I likely to distort this system through fear, habit, ego, or the urge to over-control? Your blind spots shape the system more than your strengths do.
- Alignment. Most leaders ask, what do I think? Ask instead: what are my senses telling me that my logic has not yet admitted? Treat your embodied signals as early data, then test them against the evidence.
- Strategy. Most leaders ask, what is the problem? Ask instead: who drew the boundaries of this problem, and what changes if I redraw them? The highest-leverage move is often to change the frame, not to optimize within it.
- Inclusion. Most leaders ask, who needs to approve this? Ask instead: whose perspectives must be in the room so that we are reading the same ocean, not just the same dashboard? A wider field of view is the difference between navigating and guessing.
Used together, these questions turn a single decision into a repeatable discipline — a way of reading the ocean before you set your course.
Closing
When the clouds finally opened over the Hōkūleʻa, the moon did not save Thompson — his attunement did. He had felt his way into alignment with a world far larger than himself, and the sky simply confirmed what his whole body already knew.
That is the invitation for anyone leading now. Our decisions will only grow more complex, and more crowded with non-human company — AI, robots, advanced systems we only partly understand. The work is to grow simpler and truer as we make them: to take our feelings seriously, to examine the stories and systems we live inside, and to keep choosing the course that lets everyone in our canoe finally swim.
The takeaway, in practical terms
- Redesign the currents, not the waves. Most turbulence comes from a few structural conditions: how you run meetings, who holds decision rights, what you reward, and how information moves. Instead of reacting to each new crisis, identify the one or two conditions that quietly produce most of them, and change those.
- Treat speed as a signal, not a virtue. When the pace suddenly spikes, ask whether it reflects real momentum or hidden misalignment. The more useful move is often to slow down and ask what the turbulence reveals about the system you've built.
- Make sensemaking a team capability. Reading the organization's deeper patterns is too much for one person to carry. Build it as a shared practice, so your team learns to spot these currents alongside you.
- Question any tool that promises to simplify reality. When a model, dashboard, or algorithm defines what "success" means, it is making a value judgment on your behalf. Name those judgments out loud, and decide whether you actually agree with them.
- Use emotion as data, then verify it. A flicker of unease or excitement is often the first signal that something is right or wrong before the analysis catches up. Treat that signal as a prompt to investigate, then follow it with evidence before you act.
Adriana Trandafirescu, J.D., M.A., is a doctoral candidate in Organizational Learning and Leadership at Teachers College, Columbia University, where she studies leadership and organizational vision as we learn to lead and thrive through AI-driven complexity. A professional who keeps spiraling and reinventing her career — as an attorney, coach, psychologist, mediator, well-being practitioner, and qualitative research innovator — she draws on a multifaceted life to help leaders and organizations clarify their strategy and find their vision.