It's an Inside Job
Imagine responding to challenges with quiet strength and living with a clearer sense of direction. It's an Inside Job, hosted by Jason Birkevold Liem, guides you there. This podcast is for anyone who believes cultivating inner resources is the most powerful way to shape their outer reality. We explore practical approaches for fostering resilience, nurturing well-being, and embedding intentionality into your daily rhythm.
On Mondays, we feature longer conversations with insightful individuals, uncovering practical wisdom on how your inner world serves as a compass for your outer experiences, shaping everything from your career to your relationships and personal fulfilment.
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After all, actual growth is an inside job!
It's an Inside Job
The Leadership Skill Most People Ignore: Balancing Purpose and Process (The Poet & The Plumber)
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Are you leading with clarity and structure—or are you unintentionally relying too much on inspiration or too much on systems?
Discover how balancing meaning and mechanism—the “poet and the plumber”—can improve your leadership, strengthen your routines, and increase follow-through. This episode breaks down practical tools, including the pre-mortem, to help you align purpose with process at work and in your personal projects.
Key Takeaway Insights & Tools
Leadership requires balancing meaning (poet) and mechanism (plumber).
When one dominates, progress stalls—ideas lack structure or systems lack purpose. (00:00:59–00:02:08)
The poet creates clarity of purpose so people understand why their work matters.
This role provides coherence and direction, shaping judgment and prioritization. (00:03:06–00:04:31)
The plumber ensures systems, routines, and expectations actually support the stated purpose.
When plumbing contradicts narrative, engagement drops and friction increases. (00:04:31–00:06:25)
Imbalance leads to predictable failure: meaning without structure remains theoretical; structure without meaning becomes hollow.
Two common leadership traps are inspirational intent with no systems—or rigid systems with no unifying purpose. (00:06:25–00:08:19)
The pre-mortem is a practical tool that integrates meaning and mechanism.
By imagining success and failure before execution, teams reveal risks, responsibilities, and alignment issues early. (00:09:03–00:10:34)
Tools discussed:
- Pre-mortem exercise
- Success/Failure split-team analysis
- Diagnostic questions: “Why?” for poetry, “How?” for plumbing (00:14:31–00:15:53)
Personal leadership also depends on poet–plumber balance.
Define why something matters before building habits, routines, or time blocks around it. (00:12:29–00:13:46)
Books Mentioned:
- On Leadership — James G. March
- The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder — Robert Sutton & Huggy Rao
If you found this episode valuable, share it with someone who would benefit from strengthening their leadership or personal discipline.
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