Exclusive Trusted Magazine Q&A with Kathryn Criston Briskina, Obeya Trainer - Founder of Syntegrity.works.
How can principles of discipline in music and sports directly influence and transform?
Discipline is dedicated doing. It is deciding to take action that may not be based on immediate comfort or even your own best interest but serves a greater whole. In music, discipline means training your body and mind to express and share what you feel. It’s about having the resilience to work through the steps necessary to translate an idea into reality—navigating distractions, listening, choosing what not to play - hacking a path through an overgrowth of competing inspirations.
In martial arts, you learn in a structured, disciplined environment from the start. In a dedicated training space, you drill specific techniques and mindsets, and get feedback from more advanced practitioners. The dojo (Japanese) or wuguan (Chinese), provides a space for martial artists to take risks, make mistakes, learn, and build their abilities day by day.
Whether it's a musician spending hours in the practice room or a martial artist training in a wuguan, discipline and dedicated training allows them to hone their skills and perform effortlessly, due to their dogged dedication.
The same applies to leadership. Leadership skills are not buzzwords; they are actions. Just as a martial artist trains to throw a precise punch or a singer practices scales, a leader must train specific skills—communicating clearly, delegating effectively, and engaging with people at eye level. Leadership is a language, and like any language, it requires deliberate practice.
The spontaneity of business exchange—the ability to respond quickly and communicate clearly—is performance. The mistake many leaders make is thinking they can always be in performance mode without structured, intentional practice. But real leadership, like music or sports, requires slow, careful training. It is about focusing deeply on small, targeted practices that accumulate into mastery over time.
What are the common obstacles that leaders face when striving to adopt a disciplined approach, and what strategies or insights can help them overcome these challenges?
The principles of discipline are simple: consistency and practice in a fertile environment. Sounds so obvious - why aren't all leaders doing it well?
I see the biggest challenge as the environment. Business Leaders are expected to perform constantly and build skills in conditions which are not conducive to practice. For example, you might answer messages and urgent customer needs all morning, 5 minutes later use your lunch hour to learn a new framework for effective management, 5 minutes later jump assertively into an afternoon packed with meetings. It’s like trying to train as an athlete in the middle of a storm, with constant distractions and demands pulling attention in every direction. It's like trying to run a marathon in the middle of a storm, while spectators throw tantalizing new sports equipment and energy drinks at you, demanding you run another race, while still running the race you are in.
In modern business life, we attempt to practice too many things at once, bombarded by emails, news feeds, and urgent requests. It’s like trying to play an entire orchestra full of instruments simultaneously on three different stages at the same time. The result leads to Burnout, not learning and mastery.
The solution is to be relentless about creating the right environment that you need for practice and performance. In business, this could mean having a dedicated space where leaders can see the most current performance data, strategic goals and customer feedback. It could mean eliminating fruitless status meetings and collaborating directly with your teams in this dedicated space on the issues that matter most. It's about giving yourself the space for this dedicated practice, so that you and your team can work out the slumps and bumps in practice, and perform towards the customer smoothly and professionally.
Whether it’s specific decision-making rituals, designated deep work hours, or strategic collaboration sessions. Protect the time and space you need to improve. And when it’s time to perform, fully commit—let go of the practice mindset and give everything to the moment.
From your experience, which tools or methodologies—such as Agile or Obeya—do you recommend to support leaders in building a sustainable, long-term leadership practice?
There is a powerful, pragmatic methodology that offers a fertile environment and pragmatic road to top-performance - based on the some principles of discipline that underlie Japanese martial arts - Obeya.
Obeyas have been used for decades in Japan, now increasingly in the EU, to enable sustainable systemized change through collaborative leadership. An Obeya room provides a dedicated space for leaders to focus deeply on strategy, progress, and problem-solving. It functions like a practice room in music or a training dojo in martial arts—an environment where leaders and their teams can isolate challenges, refine their responses, and develop clarity before stepping back into the unpredictable performance of daily business.
Like agile, Obeya emphasizes small, targeted improvements and practice-performance cycles. It creates rhythms for disciplined preparation and action, separating practice from performance and building rituals that reinforce real learning.
However, Obeya is simply a tool. Your leadership effectiveness depends on how you practice Obeya for personal and team development. Similar to martial arts, where feedback from peers and instructors is crucial for growth, or music, where top performers often undergo years of private instruction, finding the right Obeya Trainer and Coach can be transformative. They can guide you through distractions, teach you to listen, and help you forge a path through competing inspirations, relentlessly fostering the ideal environment for your practice and peak performance.
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