Small Bands of Determined People: Leadership When the Ground Keeps Shifting

Paul Taylor spent 26 years in the British Army — Northern Ireland, the Gulf War, the Balkans, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan — before a sliding-doors moment took him into expedition guiding. Then the 2015 Nepal earthquake happened, and three and a half weeks working as a medic alongside a scratch team of Argentinian climbers and local Nepali staff changed the direction of his life. He's now the International Operations Manger for REACT Disaster Response, a UK humanitarian charity, deploying into some of the most volatile environments on earth.

This conversation covers what actually holds a team together when the plan falls apart: why Paul selects for character over skills, what "cognitive diversity" looks like in practice versus the tick-box version, how to build psychological safety on the side of a hill in a gale, and why leaving your ego at the door isn't a platitude — it's operationally necessary.

• The Nepal earthquake and the Road to Damascus moment: how a scratch international team with no shared training outperformed expectations, and what that taught Paul about collective competence over individual brilliance
• Selecting for character, not skills: knowledge and experience can be built; character shows up under pressure or not at all
• Cognitive diversity vs. tick-box diversity: why the goal is different ways of seeing a problem, not just different faces in the room
• Situational leadership: reading the moment: when to be directive (the ground is literally shaking) and when to slow down and make space for everyone's voice
• Building psychological safety in the field: the practical, physical choices that shape whether people speak up: where you stand, how loud you talk, whether you sit down to their level
• The OODA-adjacent instinct for uncertainty: "absence of the normal, presence of the abnormal," and how to build situational awareness in a place you've never been
• Selfless commitment, and its limits: the discipline of putting the team and the mission first, and the equally important discipline of knowing when to stop, eat, sleep, and go again tomorrow
• Daily learning in the field: why after-action reviews shouldn't wait for the debrief back home, and the value of the fire-side "how are we feeling?" conversation
• Leaving your ego at the door and why that's an operational requirement, not a nice-to-have
• A message from the House of Commons: Paul's reflections on soft power, hard power, and the humanitarians operating right now in Gaza, Ukraine, and Sudan

Paul's off to Sweden this week for a 300km sea-kayak crossing of the Baltic, from Finland back to Stockholm, with a small group of friends. Ten days, a few weather windows built in, no room for over-planning.

Four things, really, rolled into one: emotional intelligence, a unifying goal everyone can buy into, attitude and effort as the non-negotiable baseline, as well as a sense of humour, because taking the work seriously doesn't mean taking yourself too seriously.

• React Disaster Response: react.org.uk
• Learning from the Edge: learningfromtheedge.co.uk

What keeps a team moving when everything says stop? For John Peck, the answer has never changed: human connection, handled with depth and care.

John is a former army officer and Metropolitan Police Commander who has spent decades leading in some of the most demanding environments imaginable — from inner-city London at its most volatile, to unclimbed Himalayan peaks, the Sahara Desert, the North Pole, and the Atlantic Ocean. In 2004, he became the oldest British person to row the Atlantic unsupported. He wasn't an elite athlete. He just refused to stop.

For the past 30 years, through his consultancy Tiger Teams, John has worked with senior leaders and organisations to build teams that perform when it matters most.

In this conversation, John and Jez — who first met at a conference in 2007 and went on to run 19 Bravehearts Wilderness Leadership Development Programmes together with inner-city youth workers — explore what genuinely high-performing teams are made of, why bringing someone in at the last minute is almost always a mistake, and why human connection isn't a leadership nicety — it runs through everything like a stick of rock.

We also discuss John's concept of turning anxiety into risk, the triangle of strategy, skills and mindset, and why the best leaders have always had an adventure waiting in the back of their mind.

John's books:
Restless — https://www.amazon.co.uk/Restless-John-Peck/dp/B0GR5HZK8L
The Seven Seas to Success — https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Add-Adventure-Your-Life-ebook/dp/B0BMM6TRMK

Find John:
Tiger Teams — https://tigerteams.co.uk
John's website — http://www.john-peck.com
LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-peck-0587125/

Uncertainty Is Not the Problem

Most leaders treat uncertainty like a fault in the system. Something to fix. Something to wait out. Psychologist Dr. Jon Rhodes has spent nearly two decades working with Olympic athletes, polar explorers, and corporate leaders — and he's clear: the teams that thrive aren't the ones who eliminate uncertainty. They're the ones who've learned to move intelligently within it. In this first episode of Learning from the Edge, Jon unpacks what expedition psychology can teach us about leading when the path isn't obvious — and why the skill you actually need isn't resilience. It's adaptability.

Links for Jon

• University of Plymouth
• Royal Geographic Society
• Instagram

Learning from the Edge

• Website
• Situational Leadership Diagnostic
• Get in touch: hello@learningfromtheedge.com