The Down-Climb Maneuver
By Justin Howe
12min read, July 24, 2026
There's a quote I love from Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia, that cuts right to where some of the hardest leadership work lives. Jimmy Chin brought it up on the Climbing Gold Podcast with Alex Honnold:
“It’s really easy to complicate your life. It’s a lot harder to simplify it.”
— Yvon Chouinard
Adding complexity to life is effortless. With cleverly designed default settings, auto-renewals, and systems built to keep you subscribing to more, complexity compounds quietly, and before long, it’s bred even more complexity and is running the place. The same thing happens in the world of leadership. Default thinking builds systems and organizations that pull leaders forward on a track that worked once, until suddenly the math isn’t working anymore.
Sometimes 3+2 doesn’t equal 5.
I’ve seen this pattern happen many times and in many different organizations. Growth slows, sometimes sharply. The “way we do things” stops working consistently and reliably. Meanwhile, expectations and pressure increase significantly and roll in like you forgot to put one of the new cover sheets on your TPS reports: aggressive growth targets, margin increases, efficiency targets, a competitive landscape raising the bar and the pace. Add in exhausting levels of uncertainty, a splash of not feeling emotionally safe within the workplace, and things quickly start to feel chaotic and unsustainable.
Here’s what I’ve found beneath the surface when leaders pause long enough to look:
● Workaround behaviors quietly multiply across teams.
● Micro-systems appear to have been built to cope with things that stopped working long ago.
● Tug-of-wars emerge between teams, stalling decisions, slowing the flywheel.
● Paradoxical thinking and the creative energy held within paradoxes have turned into polarization and divisiveness.
● Complexity has bred more complexity, quietly stealing the one thing leaders need most: clarity.
Inevitably, growth is rarely linear. The thinking and the math make sense. Until they don’t.
When that happens, it’s rarely just a strategy or execution problem. The thinking and the mental models underneath the strategy are the problem.
James Clear said it so well:
“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”
— James Clear, Atomic Habits
As a designer and creative, and now executive coach and consultant, I love the incredible creative energy stored within paradoxical thinking. I find the most incredible innovations and life-changing solutions come from working with this energy.
As a Stanford graduate, former Division I athlete, and the author of the New York Times bestseller The 5 Types of Wealth, Sahil Bloom offers valuable perspective on making progress under such circumstances.
In his weekly Curiosity Chronicle, Sahil Bloom captured something that directly applies here. From his piece “The Most Powerful Paradoxes of Life,” these are his words on what he calls the Shrinking Paradox:
● “You may need to shrink before you can grow.”
● “Growth is never linear. To reach the higher summit, you may need to climb down from the current one.”
● “Normalize short-term subtraction that creates long-term addition.”
● “One step back, two steps forward is a recipe for success.”
Sahil Bloom, “The Most Powerful Paradoxes of Life,” The Curiosity Chronicle, March 3, 2026.
The Shrinking Paradox is powerful. And yet, paradoxical thinking in leadership (holding two opposing things in tension at the same time to leverage incredible creative energy, or as I like to say “doing the both“) is often revealed to be an underdeveloped strength.
Without a strength in paradoxical thinking, optimism fuels the search for another way: a path forward that hits the growth targets without the wobble signals, without the short-term pain. A way to have the cake and eat it too.
Spoiler alert: a slightly different version of the thing that isn’t working doesn’t work.
So when adding more isn’t an option, how do you shrink? How do you find, and make the connection to, the next path to growth? The answer is hiding inside one of the greatest athletic achievements ever filmed.
Free Solo is the critically acclaimed documentary following Alex Honnold’s free solo climb (no ropes, no safety gear) of the 3,000-foot Freerider route on El Capitan in Yosemite. A 30-plus section route that typically takes climbers days to complete. Alex Honnold did it in under four hours.
Most people who watch the documentary focus on the ascent.
The lesser-known, crucial detail: to successfully climb Freerider, you need to down-climb two to three different sections.
Down-climbing isn’t how most people think about climbing. But for climbers, it’s an unavoidable reality of the sport. And within Freerider’s down-climb sections, there are three insights that translate directly to leadership:
1. The down-climb sections require precise planning, training, and precise movement to execute.
2. The down-climb sections are essential connectors that link the route from where you are to where you need to go.
3. Climbers consistently document the down-climb sections as among the most psychologically demanding on the route, because downclimbing at your limit is fundamentally more exposed than climbing up.
When adding more isn’t a viable option, the work of Alex Honnold, Jimmy Chin, and Sahil Bloom converges into something I call The Down-Climb Maneuver.
Move 1: Zoom Out
Climbers on route always know their current position. In leadership, many don’t.
Leaders who struggle with patience — and I include myself here — have a tendency to rush straight to zoom in, losing perspective in the process. This maneuver starts with the opposite move. Zoom out first. This isn’t just any normal zoom out, this is a tremendous zoom out.
Jim Collins and Morten T. Hansen developed this principle in Great by Choice: “zoom out, then zoom in.” From altitude, you can see the whole organization: the business, the competitive landscape, the systems, the structure, the culture, the habits, and most importantly, the thinking that underwrites and governs all of it.
You also see what’s still working within the mental models — the strengths you can leverage to anchor your next moves to.
Zooming out also shifts your measurement horizon. It protects against the trap of short-term singular pursuits and lets you measure success in years and decades.
We zoom out to see the big picture but also to see what is changing within the big picture.
Jean-Luc Diard and Nicolas Mermoud, co-founders of Hoka, are a remarkable example of this tremendous zoom out in action. Both had spent decades inside Salomon, one of the world’s great mountain sports companies, before deciding to build something of their own. When they did, they didn’t look inside footwear for inspiration. They zoomed out across the entire sporting goods landscape and started seeing a pattern emerge.
In a conversation with Guy Raz on How I Built This, Diard described what they were watching:
“Take TaylorMade Golf Clubs. Just to take an example, the first TaylorMade Golf Club heads, they were 200 cc. Then gradually, they moved to 300, then to 350… As they grew bigger, the products grew lighter at the same time. They gave not only more performance, but they gave also more tolerance.”
Then skis. Then mountain bikes.
“Bike wheels became much bigger. Mountain bike wheels, thicker. The profile of the rims.”
And then Diard landed the insight that the zoom out had revealed:
“We saw that oversize and lighter enabled to change paradoxes, to change paradigms. And you brought performance more, let’s say, to a bigger group.”
Golf clubs. Skis. Bike wheels. A macro shift was happening across sports, and no one in running had connected the dots yet. The zoom out revealed the gap hiding in plain sight.
“Look at those big tires. Look at those fat skis. Look at those big golf clubs.”
Hoka became the first to ask: why not running shoes?
That’s what a tremendous zoom out makes possible. Not just clarity on where you are, but the ability to see what’s changing in the broader landscape that hasn’t yet touched your world. The next path forward is often not visible from inside the thing you’re trying to change.
Jean-Luc Diard, in conversation with Guy Raz, “HOKA: Jean-Luc Diard and Nicolas Mermoud. The ‘Clown Shoe’ That Became a $2B Bonanza,” How I Built This with Guy Raz (podcast), February 2, 2026.
Move 2: Thinking by Intentional Design
Arguably, everything is downstream of the thinking. The thinking is the place that generates the greatest leverage for change, because it goes values and beliefs deep. Thinking lives beneath the systems, structures, patterns of behavior and ultimately the actions that drive movement.
This is where the clarity from the zoom out gets put to work, redesigning the mental models that got you here, so the default thinking doesn’t automatically route you on an out-and-back path that resembles the shape of a lollipop.
Because a redesign of thinking is at a values and beliefs depth, I’ve found it crucial to do this redesign work with someone who can ask questions, cut through confirmation bias, unconscious biases, and introduce new ways of thinking that can be considered along with the research, data, and lived experience of those new mental models in action.
The most powerful question I ask leaders to consider for themselves at this stage isn’t a binary “can we do this or not?” It’s: What does this change require of me as a leader, and am I willing to go through the process of becoming the kind of person who can lead through it?
That’s a harder question for a leader to consider and answer. It requires an ability to have strong ideas held loosely, with the willingness to evolve to see and build new thinking and systems that will anchor the next moves.
From my own experience in executive leadership, this is work I’ve found impossible to do alone. Asking for help, consistently, became the key that unlocked any real progress here.
Move 3: Map the Route
Precision planning starts with knowing where you are, where you’re going, and what the section after the down-climb looks like. This is the connector to the next section of ascent.
Define and map the route. Define and map what progress looks like. Define what success looks like. Build in your waypoints along with the navigational hand-rails to help you go from one step to the next. Make sure you hit the first step. The strengths you build by mapping and hitting the first step ensure you are moving at the right pace, in the right way, and aren’t rushing out of the gate only to find yourself off-route and “over your ski tips.”
One important distinction: mapping the route is not climbing the route. The map is never the road. It’s a navigation and orientation tool. Nothing more, nothing less. Simplicity is to your benefit with the map.
Move 4: Precision Planning by Design
Precision planning leverages the redesigned thinking and the map to build the specific actions, habits, behaviors, systems, and incentives that support each move. Plan and build Micro-steps. Micro-actions. Micro-behaviors.
In climbing terms, precisely plan your anchors that get you through the route. Anchors can take many forms. I like to think of some of the most unexpected anchors as “aid stations” or “feed zones.” Either way, the team will ultimately move from anchor to anchor, sometimes in the way that you expect, and other times in unexpected ways. Be open to the opportunity that the team may find a better way than originally imagined.
Make new actions easy to understand, easy to remember, and easy to repeat. Feed them intentionally. With practice, new actions grow into new habits, and new habits become new behaviors by design.
When the planning is precise and anchors are intentionally designed, I’ve consistently seen teams, working with massive constraints, move with extraordinary creativity, speed, and excellence. Embrace the creative power of intentionally designed constraints — they have a way of unlocking potential that comfort never could.
Move 5: Chalk Up — Test, Practice and Learn
Practice. Iterate. Improve. Make practice and learning a circuit you can run laps on. Be prepared to break down learning into small steps, bites or quarters. Apply the learnings with each lap of the circuit.
Pilot programs are a starting point, not a finish line. Aim for multiple cycles with a clear target: learn, iterate, and adapt when assumptions don’t land the way you planned.
Move 6: Send It
In climbing, “sending it” means committing fully to the attempt. It doesn’t always go exactly how you practiced and planned. That’s okay. That’s climbing.
Leverage your practice to adapt in the moment. A little flailing, a scary move or two — that’s not failure. That’s the natural, beautiful texture of doing something genuinely hard.
The Down-Climb Maneuver
1. Zoom Out
2. Thinking by Intentional Design
3. Map the Route
4. Precision Planning
5. Chalk Up — Test, Practice and Learn
6. Send It
To reach the higher peak, you may need to down-climb from the current one.
Short-term subtraction creates the capacity for long-term growth, when the thinking is intentionally redesigned and the route ahead is clearly mapped. Down-climbing with precision isn’t retreat. It’s how you connect to the next section of growth.
Yvon Chouinard is right. Simplifying is the harder work.
It’s also the more rewarding way to climb to the top of a route.
Glad you’re here, my friend. Peace be with you.
— Justin