A few weeks ago I was anchored in a calm bay. The kind of water that makes you distrust your own eyesight. Too clear, too calm… almost rude.
A couple drifted past on a paddleboard. Someone leaned over the side of the yacht and tossed bits of bread into the water. Within seconds the fish appeared. Not shy. Not cautious. Professional. They gathered right under the surface, flashing and swirling as if someone had rung a dinner bell.
Everyone loved it. The humans laughed. The fish performed. More bread followed. Phones came out. A small crowd formed on the swimming platform of the boat. And the whole scene had that slightly absurd beauty of vacation: people feeling generous with food they weren’t going to miss, fish being enthusiastic about a deal they didn’t have to question.
It was harmless. It was fun. It was also, if you watch it closely, a perfect little system. Nothing in that bay required a decision. You can feed fish all day and still sleep well. No consequences. No trade-offs. No awkward moment where the activity turns into something else. And that’s exactly why the image stuck with me.
Later that day, I had a conversation that felt oddly similar. You know the type. Good energy. Warm signals. The verbal equivalent of fish showing up right under the surface: “This is exciting.”, “We should definitely.”, “This could be huge.”, “Let’s keep talking.”
If you’ve led anything in an organization, you’ve lived inside those sentences. And the problem is not that they’re fake. Often they’re genuine. The problem is what we do next. Because way too often we treat interest as if it were commitment. We confuse the bay with the kitchen. Feeding fish isn’t bad. It’s just not dinner.
If you want dinner, you need a hook. And once you put a hook in the water, you’re no longer doing something consequence-free. You are deciding to turn a pleasant moment into a real outcome… and you have to live with what that implies. It’s the moment where you stop feeding interest and start accepting consequences.
Why interest keeps pulling us back
There’s a reason leaders can get stuck in “high interest, low commitment” cycles. It’s because interest feels like progress in a very physical way. Neuroscience even has a concept that explains this: reward prediction error.
In simple terms: your brain learns fastest when reality surprises you. When something is better than expected (or simply different than expected) your brain treats that gap between what you predicted and what you got as a teaching signal. It’s one of the mechanisms behind how we learn what to repeat. Now translate that into leadership life.
Interest often arrives as a surprise:
- The stakeholder who suddenly replies fast.
- The senior person who says “I love this.”
- The unexpected invitation to present it “to the wider group.”
- The partner who signals momentum out of nowhere.
- The board member who warms up, briefly, then disappears again.
These moments are small, but they’re reward-shaped and they’re unpredictable. That unpredictability is the key.
Behavioral science has known for a long time that intermittent rewards (rewards that show up inconsistently) create persistent behavior. Variable ratio schedules in particular are famous for producing high, steady effort because you never know when the next reward will arrive.
So if you’re leading an initiative and you keep getting irregular hits of approval, attention, and “yes-ish” signals, you will keep doing the thing that produces them: more decks, more meetings, more alignment rounds, more “exploring.” Another handful of bread.
It’s not vanity but a learning loop. And to make it even more human: social approval is a reward in its own right. We’re wired to track it. The brain’s reward systems respond to social signals too, not just money or food.
Feeding fish works. The fish show up. The feedback is immediate. You feel effective. But you can feed fish all day and still be hungry.
Kindness, clarity, and the price of dinner
At this point, leadership usually reaches for a moral cover story. Not in a cynical way but in a sincere way. People say things like:
- “We don’t want to pressure anyone.”
- “Let’s keep it inclusive.”
- “Let’s stay open for now.”
- “We should build alignment first.”
And I want to be careful here: niceness is not the enemy. Niceness is one of the few things that makes hard work sustainable. The issue is when niceness becomes equal to keeping everything consequence-free. Dinner isn’t consequence-free.
The moment you move from interest to commitment, you create trade-offs. Every real “yes” is also a “no.” Not necessarily to someone’s feelings, but to time, attention, resources, alternatives. Strategy, in the end, is a series of decisions for something and therefore against something else.
That’s why many organizations prefer the bay. In the bay, you can be generous without choosing. And there’s even a smart principle that encourages restraint: Falkland’s Law, usually quoted as “When it is not necessary to make a decision, it is necessary not to make a decision.”
As advice, it’s excellent. Don’t decide too early. Don’t force false certainty. Don’t harden options prematurely. But you can’t play Falkland forever.
At some point, the decision becomes necessary. Not because you suddenly feel brave, but because time, budget, people, and credibility are finite. “Keeping it open” stops being strategic restraint and becomes a way to postpone the moment where you limit yourself… or disappoint someone.
And don’t get me wrong here: Leadership doesn’t mean deciding early always. Leadership is deciding when the decision is finally required, and then owning what it costs.
The aquarium effect
Feed fish in the same spot long enough and you don’t just create a fun moment, but also a pattern. The fish learn where to show up. They learn what behavior gets rewarded. They become domesticated by the routine. That’s learning.
Operant conditioning is, at its core, about how behavior changes through reinforcement. If a behavior is rewarded, it becomes more likely. If rewards are intermittent and unpredictable, the behavior becomes stubbornly persistent.
Organizations do the same thing to people.
If leaders consistently reward interest signals (attendance, enthusiasm, positive feedback) without ever requiring commitment, stakeholders adapt. They learn that it’s safe to be supportive as long as you never put anything at stake. They become excellent at “love it” without “let’s do it.”
They become aquarium fish. And then leaders get frustrated: “Why is everyone enthusiastic but nothing moves?” The answer is usually less about motivation and more about training. You rewarded the bay behavior.
It’s worth saying plainly: this is not a character flaw in stakeholders. It’s a system doing what systems do. People optimize to the reinforcement you provide. If the organization keeps feeding interest, it shouldn’t be surprised when it gets interest.
The hook, in leadership terms
So what is the hook? It’s not aggression. It’s not “pushing harder.” It’s not turning every conversation into a transaction.
The hook is the moment you convert a warm signal into a specific commitment that carries consequences. It also happens to be the difference between feeding and eating.
A useful bridge from science here is implementation intentions… the research line around “if–then” planning. The core idea: strong intentions don’t reliably turn into action unless you specify when and how you’ll act (“If situation X occurs, then I will do Y”). Meta-analytic work suggests these if–then plans improve follow-through because they link cues to actions and reduce the need for willpower in the moment.
Leadership hooks are organizational if–then plans:
- If we agree this matters, then who owns it?
- If we need more data, then what data exactly and when do we decide?
- If we “keep it open,” then what are we deliberately not doing while it’s open?
That last line is where dinner begins. Because now “open” has a price tag.
Commitment devices, but with adult supervision
Many leaders overestimate willpower. Behavioral economics uses the term commitment devices for structures that make future follow-through more likely by creating constraints or consequences in advance. You don’t rely on mood. You design the path so drifting becomes harder than acting.
Organizations need the same maturity. A real commitment device at work usually looks like one of these:
- Budget: money allocated, even a small amount. Money is a declaration.
- Capacity: a named team and protected time. Not “support when possible.”
- Decision rights: who can actually say yes (and who cannot).
- Kill criteria: what would make us stop the pilot. (Yes, stop.)
- Deadlines with teeth: a date that triggers a decision, not another meeting.
None of this requires being harsh. In many environments it’s the kinder move, because it prevents the slow bleed of organizational stress that comes from endless “almost-decisions.”
Which brings us back to the grill: If you want to eat, you don’t just need a hook. You need to be willing to accept what eating implies: a choice, a sacrifice, a “not that,” a boundary, an ending.
There’s another reason leaders stay in the bay: it’s an elegant way to avoid ownership while looking productive. Sometimes we outsource responsibility to experts because then the initiative feels supervised while nobody personally carries the consequences. Sometimes we outsource responsibility to enthusiasm. We let interest stand in for action. We treat a warm room as evidence that the hard part is done.
It isn’t. Interest is a signal. Sometimes it’s even a gift. But it’s not a contract.
Back to the bay
I still like that scene: fish, bread, laughter, lightness. Not everything has to become dinner. Some things are allowed to be joyful and pointless.
But leadership is also the contextual, and situational ability to know which mode you’re in. If you’re feeding fish for the experience, enjoy it. That’s part of being human.
If you’re trying to build something, then at some point you have to move from interest to commitment. You have to put the hook in the water. And once you do, you’re not “being less kind.” You’re being clear about consequences.
Dinner has consequences whether you acknowledge them or not.
The only question is: “Who pays?”