How MQNA works
MQNA is a four-step practice for the moments that matter most in leadership: notice what is happening, ask the question that opens it up, bring in what is already known, and choose how you respond.
The framework
MQNA is the framework Leadership Rewired is built on and the practice that underpins all my coaching work. You can use it in two ways: in the moment, to steady your own thinking under pressure, and over time, as four practices you build with your team.
In the moment
Name the tension you are in right now. Leadership pressure rarely announces itself clearly. The Moment is the practice of pausing to notice what is actually happening - and what you feel about it.
With your team
Noticing the moments that matter while they're happening - and naming them, rather than recognising them afterwards.
In the moment
Ask one honest question about it. Not the question that confirms what you already think. The one that opens something up. A good question gets you further than an hour of going round in circles.
With your team
Asking questions that help others think for themselves, instead of reaching straight for the answer.
In the moment
Bring in an insight that reframes it. Most leadership tensions have been thought about and researched before - the Nugget brings that thinking into the room, not as theory, but as something you can use.
With your team
Turning experience into lessons you pass on, so learning doesn't stay in your head.
In the moment
Set an intention that changes how you respond. Not positive thinking - a specific, believable statement you return to until it shapes how you approach the tension.
With your team
Giving specific recognition that builds confidence, so people know exactly what they did well.
In practice
A meeting runs off course. You notice - and stay quiet anyway. Something doesn't sit right.
The reactive instinct
Stay quiet, or steer the conversation back yourself without naming what's happening.
The intentional response, out loud
"Can we pause and check we're still solving the right problem?"
The evidence
Under pressure, the brain doesn't think the way we assume it does.
Decisions draw on limited mental resources, and they are shaped by emotion far more than we usually admit. Under pressure, the body's threat response kicks in, and stress hormones such as cortisol can temporarily weaken the careful, flexible thinking that depends on the brain's prefrontal cortex. The psychologist Daniel Goleman popularised a name for the experience of being overtaken by a strong emotion: "amygdala hijack". Neuroscientists describe the underlying process in more nuanced terms, but the everyday effect is familiar - high-pressure moments push leaders towards fast, reactive decisions rather than considered ones.
Research consistently links effective self-regulation to metacognitive awareness - thinking about one's own thinking. Naming a tension moment is designed to work like a circuit breaker, interrupting the automatic stress response before it fully takes hold.
Asking a question rather than reacting immediately draws on cognitive reappraisal, studied extensively by James Gross at Stanford and one of the best-evidenced emotion regulation strategies. Questions create distance from the immediate emotional pull, giving the prefrontal cortex room to re-engage.
A short, research-grounded insight functions as scaffolding: external structure to support internal processing. This draws on the generation effect - the finding that we absorb and apply information better when we actively connect it to our own situation.
MQNA's affirmations favour specific, believable language over generic positive thinking - aimed at reinforcing the response a leader wants to build, repeated consistently until it takes hold.
MQNA doesn't yet claim to have been tested as a framework in its own right - that's part of where ongoing work is heading. What it offers today is a structure built from mechanisms that are independently well-supported, brief enough for real leadership moments.
One insight to take with you
Good questions help people think for themselves. Asking thoughtful questions helps others find their own insights and build confidence.
Working together
One-to-one coaching for Directors, VPs and senior leaders. Six fortnightly sessions over three months, extendable if useful. One framework. At least one practice you actually keep.
I also run half-day and full-day workshops for leadership teams, shaped around what the team needs - including values work if that's the gap.
Every programme is shaped around the leader or team. We'll talk through scope and investment on a free 30-minute call.
How each session works
Open (10 min)You bring a live tension - something real you're dealing with right now.
Apply MQNA together (25 min)We work through it using the framework, in real time.
Name the pattern (10 min)We identify which of the eight leadership tensions it maps to.
Close (15 min)You leave with one commitment and one practice to take with you.
Where it comes from
Over 17 years across academia, banking and civil society, I kept seeing the same pattern: capable leaders making reactive calls under pressure, not from a lack of judgement, but because no one had given them a way to stop and see more clearly. I saw it building and running a complaints team in banking, where policy met real people every day. I saw it again working with civil society leaders trying to agree what they stood for at senior level. Community development, running through all of it, taught me the most - leading without the authority to simply direct people. That gap is what MQNA was built to close.
MQNA is set out in full in Leadership Rewired, applied to the eight tensions leaders run into most.