The Mistake That Cost Me A Decision I Still Think About: Why I Built An Eclectic Leaders Council

I think the problem is that I learnt late in life that most leadership decisions had several moving parts, political, psychological, financial, cultural, and most leadership support still assumes one relationship can hold all of them at once. It usually can't.

Worth knowing before you read on that I am not suggesting that the fix is more coaching or less coaching, it's a different instrument for a different order of decision. This gets mistaken for a board of advisors, a stack of separate coaching sessions, and a competitor to AI coaching. None of those comparisons hold and I'll show you why, along with what this actually costs, what it risks, and what it looks like in practice.

The mistake

I made a big call once having taken one advisor's input on a decision that needed more than one lens. Let me be precise about what went wrong, because it wasn't the advice. The advice was good and a good coach doesn't hand you the answer anyway, they ask the right questions and let you find your own way there, and I'm glad with that. The decision was always mine to own, and I still own it.

What went wrong was the room. I was doing my own synthesis alone, across a decision that touched people, money, timing and politics at once, with only one perspective in the mix to weigh against my own. The ownership was never the issue, the isolation of the thinking was.

I found that out the expensive way, and the cleanup took longer than the original decision did.

What I rectified

I stopped looking for the next great individual advisor and built something older than the coaching industry. Long before anyone billed by the hour for wisdom, communities facing a genuinely hard decision, a succession, a conflict, a bad harvest, convened. Different disciplines, different vantage points, brought around one person or one decision, because no single perspective was ever assumed sufficient alone.

An eclectic mix of experts, assembled around one specific individual and one specific decision, chosen because their backgrounds don't match. None of them there to agree with each other. All of them there because the disagreement, held properly, is where clarity gets made.

I didn't need a better advisor. I needed more of them, disagreeing, in the same room before the decision hardened.

Two conditions. Collectivity: many advisors, one client, formed around what's needed in that season, then dissolved once the need passes. This is where connection lives, being surrounded rather than depending on one voice for everything. Community: once the Council has done its work, can what it generated be offered onward, without breaching confidence, without cheapening it. This is confluence, the alignment of one person's integrity with the wider values around them.

"Isn't this just a board of advisors?"

A board is built for the organisation, fixed seats, standing cadence, membership that tends to look similar even when the CVs differ. A Council is built for the person, around one decision, and dissolves once the need passes, deliberately mismatched by design. A board protects the organisation whereas a Council serves the individual, then asks whether the community can benefit too.

"Why not just see five different coaches?"

Because the isolation was never the number of opinions I had, it was that I was still the only place those opinions ever met. Five sequential sessions leaves you with five sets of notes and the same solitary synthesis job. In a Council, the psychologist challenges the strategist's read on timing while you watch it happen live. You still own the decision. You're no longer the only place the perspectives meet.

"What about AI coaching?"

I believe sincerely that it is worth taking seriously. AI coaching avatar platforms are projected to grow from roughly $1.2 billion in 2025 to $8.2 billion by 2032. The AI coaching avatar market is projected to grow from USD 1.2 billion in 2025 to USD 8.2 billion by 2032 at about 27% CAGR, and it's genuinely good at rehearsal, structuring your own thinking, holding patterns across months of notes no person could keep in their head. None of that is what the Council does, and I'd rather say so plainly than compete on ground I'd lose. The real fault line was never human versus AI, it was one versus many. A single human coach and a single AI coach are, structurally, the same shape, one voice, sequential rather than concurrent. The Council exists at the point where a decision has enough moving parts that no single relationship, carbon or silicon, was ever going to be enough alone.

The risks worth considering

More people in a room isn't automatically better than one good person in a room. Boards have plenty of voices and still produce groupthink, because the number of people was never the variable that mattered, the willingness to genuinely disagree was. A Council built from advisors who are eclectic in title only, same industry, same worldview, produces the same diplomatic mush a bad board produces, just with better branding. The curation has to be ruthless about actual difference or the whole thing is theatre.

Confidentiality is a real cost, not a footnote. Five people know more than one does, and every advisor works under the terms the client sets, non-negotiable, but I won't pretend that circle is as small as a single coaching relationship.

Accountability doesn't dissolve either. Each Council carries a named convenor, responsible for holding the synthesis together and making sure disagreement produces a decision rather than a stalemate. The client owns the decision, as always. The convenor owns the process.

What this actually looks like

Picture the CEO of a mid-sized US financial services firm, two years from a planned retirement, sitting squarely inside the leaving-well question rather than the leading-well one. He isn't working through a succession plan in the usual sense and it isn't a board decision either. He's trying to work out what the firm's operating instinct becomes once the person who built that instinct is gone.

It's four problems wearing one coat. Regulatory relationships built over twenty years that don't transfer with a job title. An organisational culture that has quietly outsourced its ethical judgement to one person's gut instinct, and doesn't know it yet. A financial cost to unwinding decision-making structures built around him. And a genuine linguistic problem, how do you name a set of principles clearly enough that they survive being repeated by people who never worked with him directly.

A Council convened for exactly that decision might bring together a political scientist who understands regulatory dynamics, a psychologist focused on organisational identity through leadership transition, someone versed in indigenous governance traditions around how communities encode long-term norms without depending on a single ruler, and a linguist to help name the change so it holds. Four disciplines, one decision, assembled because none of the four could have carried it alone, then stood down once the framework was in place.

That's collectivity in practice. Community follows afterwards, and this is where the wider architecture matters: the wisdom this CEO directs doesn't just shape his own firm's succession, stripped of anything identifying, the pattern of how a decision-making culture survives its founder becomes exactly the kind of insight that channels back into developing the next generation of leaders. That flow, from the peak of the arc back to its beginning, is the actual mechanism behind the community condition, not a vague gesture at giving back.

The Eclectic Legacy conversation

I must share with you the honest version of something that can sound like gatekeeping if I don't explain it properly. The client doesn't select the Council. The decision does.

Eclectic Legacy is the third stage in this whole ecosystem. Eclectic Education asks how do I learn well, for anyone still forming their leadership identity. Eclectic Teams asks how do I lead well, for professionals leading inside organisations. Eclectic Legacy asks how do I leave well, for accomplished leaders who've accumulated wisdom, networks and resources, and are ready to direct them intentionally rather than let them disperse by accident.

A Council only gets convened for decisions that genuinely sit inside that third question. Not every difficult decision qualifies, and that's the point rather than an insult. A succession. a cultural framework meant to outlast its founder, a structural choice about what gets handed down and to whom. That's a different category from a hard quarter or a difficult conversation with a direct report, and the filter isn't are you worthy of the room, it's does this decision belong to the leaving-well question rather than the leading-well one. Bring the decision - If it sits in that category, we convene. If it doesn't, you're better served by the coach you already trust, and I'll tell you that plainly.

What it costs and how it runs

I want to be straightforward about this rather than dance around it. A Council is not priced like a coaching engagement, and it shouldn't be compared as if it were. Coaching is built for a regular rhythm, one relationship, ongoing, and priced accordingly. A Council is assembled once, around one decision, from several senior specialists convened specifically for you, not booked from a shared calendar of clients. Engagements typically begin at several times the cost of a comparable coaching relationship, because what's being assembled isn't a service, it's a room built entirely around your particular quest, your reflections, your results.

There's no rate card, because there's no standard Council. Every engagement is scoped around the decision in front of you: which disciplines it actually needs, how long the work takes to reach something solid, what "resolved" looks like for that specific question. That conversation happens before anything is assembled, not after. If your decision turns out to need a coach rather than a Council, I'll tell you that plainly, and the conversation costs you nothing but the time it takes to have it.

Where I landed

Roughly half of CEOs report significant loneliness in the role, and 61% say it hinders their performance. Research from Harvard Business Review found that 50% of CEOs report significant loneliness in their role, and 61% say it actively hinders their performance. I was one of those statistics once, working a big decision through a single relationship because that's the model everyone hands you. I don't do that anymore.

I wish I'd built the room the first time. I didn't. But I did eventually, and it's held up every time since.

Eclectically yours,

Shehzaad,

London, UK

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