During the week of the Hungarian Grand Prix, after months of commuting between the F1 calendar and California while running a multi-location business, I arrived at the team hotel in Budapest close to empty.
I tried to check in.
They had double-booked my room. The other guest had already checked in. After a series of calls to their customer service line: calls that went nowhere, they arranged another hotel across the city, assured me it had availability, and put me in a taxi.
It didn’t have availability.
The second hotel had inherited a problem they hadn’t created and wanted no part of it. They wouldn’t make calls. They wouldn’t take responsibility. As far as they were concerned, this was someone else’s problem, not theirs.
Which left me standing in a hotel lobby at close to midnight with nowhere to go.
I spent the next two hours calling hotels, calling the team hotel again, and working through a mental list of colleagues I hoped I wouldn’t have to wake at 2am.
I called the Kempinski without any particular expectation.
I had no reservation. No loyalty status in Budapest. No claim on them whatsoever.
The person who answered said: “Come over. We’ll figure something out.”
It was around 2am when I arrived.
They did exactly what they said they would. Calmly. Without making the situation feel like my problem to carry. They found me a temporary suite for the night, fed me, and moved me into a regular room the next day once space opened up.
I’ve stayed loyal to that brand ever since.
Not because the evening went well.
Because of what the Kempinski chose to do with a problem that was never theirs.
Three organisations. The same problem passed between them. Two transferred it. One absorbed it.
That night, I didn’t have language for what I’d experienced.
I just knew something had worked completely differently.
It was only later: watching other systems operate under pressure, in very different environments, that I started to understand what I’d actually experienced.
At the 2023 Qatar Grand Prix, McLaren completed a pit stop in 1.80 seconds.
From the outside, it looks almost simple. The car arrives. Four tyres change. The car leaves.
What makes it possible has almost nothing to do with those 1.80 seconds.
It’s the strategy discussions held days before. The choreography rehearsed hundreds of times. The wheel-gun practice. The telemetry. The scenario planning for failures that never happened. The communication protocols refined until they required almost no communication at all.
By the time the car arrives, the complexity has already been absorbed.
The driver receives stillness.
I spent years working as a clinician before I became a founder.
When a complex patient walks in: an elite athlete, six months before a major competition, carrying anxiety from coaches and agents and sponsors and the quiet terror of not knowing whether their body will hold, the room contains an enormous amount of competing pressure.
My job was never to eliminate that pressure.
It was to decide where it lived.
The athlete shouldn’t leave carrying my diagnostic process. The hypotheses I was testing. The uncertainty I was working through. The differential I was building between referred pain and a structural issue and something further up the chain.
That was my cognitive load to carry.
The athlete had enough of their own.
What the athlete left with was a plan.
“Here’s what we’re doing today.”
The complexity didn’t disappear. It was contained.
This is the thing I’ve come to notice most clearly in organisations under pressure.
Not whether they have problems.
Every organisation has problems.
But what they do with the complexity those problems create.
Some organisations absorb it. They decide who carries it.
Others transfer it. Outward. To customers. To frontline staff. To whoever is least equipped to absorb it.
The difference isn’t visible under normal conditions.
Both types of organisation can look impressive when things go according to plan.
The real differentiator appears under friction.
When timelines slip. When plans fail. When pressure arrives unexpectedly.
That’s when you discover whether the system absorbs complexity or transfers it.
The best organisations I’ve worked with have made a deliberate decision about who carries the complexity required to serve the people depending on them.
Not by eliminating it.
Not by pretending it doesn’t exist.
By deciding, clearly and in advance, that it won’t reach the people it would damage most.
The Kempinski didn’t solve the problem before I arrived.
They made sure I never had to carry it.
Great organisations don’t eliminate complexity.
They carry it so others don’t have to.