Robin Weninger

Once a year, Cologne burns the Nubbel. A ritual that is a leadership masterclass in metabolizing failure. Most teams don’t struggle with making mistakes, but they struggle with ending the story. By blaming the system instead of the person, you clear the "emotional fog" and protect trust. It is the art of burning the guilt while keeping the obligation. Stop poisoning your future with the unburied ghosts of yesterday.

Executing harder is often just a way to avoid admitting the conditions have changed. Adaptability isn’t a vibe; it is strictly the speed and quality of your updates. Most teams fail because they are more loyal to their old routine than the current reality. If your behavior doesn’t change after you learn something new, you haven’t adapted. True calibration means matching your effort to the wind you have, not the wind you remember.

Stop blaming execution for every setback. True performance is a system of three gates: whether your team can actually transfer skills to their work (Competence), whether your tools and processes actually allow for success (Environment), and whether the culture makes taking action feel safe (Activation). If you keep pulling the training lever when the boat itself is leaking, you’ll only end up with a frustrated crew and the same broken results.

Many organizations suffer from "basement thinking," where they mistake busy internal maintenance for strategic progress. Because organizational design dictates what gets attention, teams often perfect their "mopping" processes while ignoring the "roof" work needed to adapt to the outside world. To stay relevant, leaders must break the cycle of internal obsession and intentionally allocate attention to external shifts, even if it means letting the basement stay wet for a while.

AI has raised the "productivity floor," making the ability to generate polished drafts a cheap commodity rather than a sign of competence. As the bottleneck shifts from information retrieval to critical judgment, value is no longer found in the volume of output but in the ability to filter, verify, and make defensible decisions. To thrive, individuals must move beyond "good enough" AI summaries and focus on high-level synthesis and sharp questioning that anchors automated work in reality.