I-Mode and R-Mode Leadership

A few weeks ago I was bundling the kids into the Kia Sorento for the school run. My eight-year-old climbed in, clipped his seatbelt, and within thirty seconds said what he always says. “Dad, can we put it in sports mode?”

I smiled, switched the dial, and felt that familiar little surge. Same car. Completely different way of moving through the world.

Later that day, sitting with an overwhelmed principal and their team, moving from issue to issue with no space to think, it got me thinking about the different modes that leadership teams need to be in, and how rarely they name them, or deliberately shift between the two.

The Idea: Your leadership team is capable of two very different modes. The teams that make the biggest gains get deliberate about which mode they’re in, and when.

30-Second Version

• R-Mode is running the school: reactive, responsive, moving fast between people and problems. It’s necessary, and it takes up most of your time
• I-Mode is improvement leadership: slower, deliberate, protected thinking about how to make things genuinely better
• Most leadership teams spend almost all of their time in R-Mode, not because they want to, but because R-Mode is loud and urgent and I-Mode is easy to defer. And to be fair, the system keeps rewarding R-Mode
• The teams that make real gains find ways to carve out even 5–10% of their time in genuine I-Mode

The Full Read

R-Mode is where most of your leadership life happens, and rightly so. Running a school well is serious, skilled work. The quick decisions, the pastoral moments, the problems that land without warning. R-Mode keeps the community going, and it takes real skill to do it well.

I-Mode asks something different of you. It’s slow, deliberate, and uninterrupted. Rather than responding to what’s in front of you, you’re thinking together about what you’re actually trying to do and whether it’s working. The careful conversations that the urgent week keeps pushing out finally get to happen.

The problem most leadership teams face isn’t lack of commitment to improvement. It’s that I-Mode never quite gets entered. They schedule it on the calendar, but bring R-Mode thinking into the room: moving too fast, staying too surface-level, deferring the deeper conversations because the urgent always edges them out.

I ask leaders two questions. What percentage of your week is spent in genuine I-Mode? And during a term, which weeks, which days, which parts of the day do you actually shift into it? Most leaders pause when I ask that. Because when they’re honest, the answer is somewhere between very little and almost none.

And yet the teams I work with who get real cut-through often only carve out 5 to 10% of their time in I-Mode. Not a lot, but enough, when it’s protected and genuinely used, to actually move improvement forward.

The shift isn’t just about finding time. I-Mode requires your cognitive prime time. You can’t slip into genuine improvement thinking at the end of a draining day between two urgent emails. You have to put the dial somewhere different, deliberately and together as a team.

Small step → This week, open your calendar and ask honestly: where is our I-Mode time over the coming month? Not the meetings that feel strategic but drift into R-Mode within minutes — the genuinely protected, slow, deliberate time to think together about improvement. If you can’t find it, that’s your starting point. Even one hour of real I-Mode this week, guarded carefully, is worth more than a full day of improvement talk that never leaves R-Mode.