Calm in the Current: What Kayaking Taught Me During High-Tide Moments

Last weekend, I went kayaking with friends on Lake Washington. The water was unusually high. The currents were strong. But instead of fighting it, I stayed still — observing, adjusting, and letting the kayak glide through the movement.

In that moment, I was reminded of one of the most important leadership lessons I’ve learned — taught to me years ago by my former leader, Larry Hack.Larry isn’t just a leader — he’s an avid base jumper and deep-sea diver. His entire philosophy was shaped by environments where panic can be fatal and calm decision-making becomes survival. Little did I realize then how deeply this mindset would apply to leading data teams during high-tide operational moments.

High-Tide Moments in Data Leadership

In data leadership, high-tide moments don’t come from nature — they come from systems:

• A WBR dashboard breaking hours before leadership review

• Discrepancies in risk signals before critical fraud detection models run

• Backlogs silently building in a streaming pipeline

• Upstream schema changes propagating into broken downstream metrics

It’s tempting to panic: escalate quickly, assign blame, or patch over the issue to meet the deadline.

But I’ve seen — again and again — that the best leaders pause. They create space for clarity and guide teams into structured deep dives, not emotional reactions.

Deep Dive, Don’t Panic — Ask Better Questions

The leadership doesn’t lie in solving the immediate issue, but in how you approach the investigation.

When the tides rise, I’ve learned to guide my teams with questions like:

• Why did this fail now?

• What changed upstream?

• Were we depending on silent assumptions?

• Where is the true ownership of this data signal?

• How could we have detected this earlier?

• How do we avoid this permanently without over-engineering?

These aren’t blame-seeking questions — they’re growth-seeking questions.

Calm Leadership Builds Stronger Data Cultures

Every failure carries both risk and opportunity, When we stay calm as leaders:

• We de-escalate emotional reactions.

• We encourage honest investigation rather than defensive posturing.

• We normalize postmortems as learning tools, not blame games.

• We build resilience — not just in systems, but in people.

Because in reality: perfect data pipelines don’t exist. But resilient teams do.

The View After The Storm

As I continued kayaking through the high tides that afternoon, the clouds slowly opened — and right in front of me was a stunning, clear view of Mount Rainier.

That moment felt symbolic: When you stay calm through turbulence, you often reach the kind of clarity you couldn’t see at the start.

The same holds true in data leadership: Calm doesn’t just solve problems—it creates perspective. And that perspective helps us lead with both technical precision and long-term vision.Calm leadership is contagious — and scalable.

The best leadership perspective appears only after we’ve calmly weathered the storm.

What questions do you ask when your data systems hits high tide?

Let’s share, reflect, and build better sustainable leadership together.

— Junaith Haja
Harnessing Data and AI for social good, one blog at a time.