Navigating Complex Ecosystems: Lessons from Brightline's Naomi Allen on Balancing Internal and External Focus

Many leaders find it easier to talk about innovation than to do the next step of applying it within their own domain.?

Naomi Allen is an exception.

Allen is the founder of Brightline. Founded in 2019, before COVID made online medical consultations fairly routine, Brighline’s innovation was offering kids and teens faster and easier access to professional help, often at lower costs than traditional in-person therapy.?

Brightline has over five million members, a good 700,000 of them are uninsured. Allen cares deeply about expanding high-quality behavioral health support for every child and teen who needs it, and she's passionate about helping families navigate the often-baffling maze of insurance coverage and the frustrating red tape from school administrators when kids need behavioral support. She is mission driven, but she's also a hard-headed Systems Leader.?

Brightline is not a charity; her investors expect growth and profitability. If the financials don’t work, Brightline won’t survive. That’s why, during the broad pullback in venture capital investments in late 2022, she was one of the first startup CEOs to cut her burn rate and pivot toward from rapid growth to sustainability.

This belt tightening, however, didn’t equate to treating employees badly. When Brightline had to conduct layoffs to reduce that burn rate, Allen made sure the startup was generous toward those let go.

Allen developed her talent for navigating complex ecosystems — for seeing how a wide range of pieces fit together — as a young consultant for McKinsey. She believes in experimenting with new approaches and testing them as objectively as possible, rather than accepting any conventional wisdom uncritically.

When she’s looking to launch or re-launch a product, she does what she calls a clean sheet exercise. She asks questions like: What would we want it to look like, knowing what we know now? Then she and her team asks: What would it take to run the business that way, starting from where they are??

It’s an approach that requires accepting the sunk costs of abandoning old approaches and expectations.

Business professors Wesley M. Cohen and Daniel A. Levinthal have called the ability to embrace new ideas from outside the “absorptive capacity of the organization.” They argued that leaders tend to conflate two distinct skills: scanning the outside world for new ideas and data, and then implementing changes within their organization based on that new knowledge. Many leaders focus on the first part, such as by reading widely and going to conferences to absorb the latest trends, insights, and research. But the harder challenge is communicating such ideas from their own brains to their entire organizations, in ways that prompt real and lasting changes.?

To adapt and survive, Allen is constantly scanning her broad ecosystem for ideas that she can introduce at Brightline. This requires frequent toggling between her internal and external modes of operating. “There are phases where I've got to be more internally focused and phases where I've got to be more externally focused," she shared while I was interviewing her for my book. "I try to step back on a regular cadence, nearly every week, to ask myself if I’m spending my time the right way. Does every meeting on my calendar have to be there? Am I blocking enough time for higher level strategic work?”

Allen doesn’t see herself as a naturally internal or external person; she has worked on honing both skillsets. When working on a new commercial strategy, she was out in the field interviewing new candidates, talking to new partners, and meeting with customers to get customer input and feedback. On the other hand, when their growth was going through the roof, her focus was internal. She had to retain their top performers, and she got personally involved with complex strategic renegotiations of key contracts, potentially breaking up with underperforming partner organizations while working to improve results for their key partners.

Most business leaders prioritize the needs of their customers, employees, and investors, in some combination. But every company also has a broader ecosystem of external players it needs to be constantly considering. This ecosystem includes partners and suppliers (who are usually allies), competitors (who are usually adversaries), and companies that might toggle between acting as partners or competitors in different situations (for whom an appropriate term might be “frenemies”). In these scenarios, it’s not that all cooperation has been replaced by competition, but that a complex interplay fluctuates between those extremes.

Allen teaches us an important lesson about navigating these cross-pressures: You can understand both internal and external and need not focus on only one.

About The Systems Leader:

A groundbreaking blueprint for mastering “cross-pressures” in a rapidly changing world, teaching leaders to execute?and?innovate, think locally?and?globally, and project ambition and?statesmanship alike—from a Stanford Graduate School of Business lecturer and consultant to some of the biggest and most innovative CEOs.

Actionable and powerful, The Systems Leader is a playbook for riding turbulent waves instead of drowning in them—and for taking readers from chaos to clarity.

About Robert:

Robert Siegel is a Lecturer in Management at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, a venture investor, and an operator.

At the Stanford Graduate School of Business he has taught nine different courses, authored over 115 business cases, and led research on companies including Google, Charles Schwab, Daimler, AB InBev, Box, Stripe, Target, AngelList, 23andMe, Majid Al Futtaim, Tableau, PayPal, Medium, Autodesk, Minted, Axel Springer and Michelin, amongst others.

Robert is a Venture Partner at Piva and a General Partner at XSeed Capital. He sits on the Board of Directors of Avochato and FindMine, and led investments in Zooz (acquired by PayU of Naspers), Hive, Lex Machina (acquired by LexisNexis of RELX Group?), CirroSecure (acquired by Palo Alto Networks), Nova Credit, The League (acquired by Match Group), Teapot (acquired by Stripe), Pixlee (acquired by Emplifi), and SIPX (acquired by ProQuest).

He is the author of The Systems Leader: Mastering the Cross-Pressures That Make or Break Today's Companies, and The Brains and Brawn Company: How Leading Organizations Blend the Best of Digital and Physical.

He is the co-inventor of four patents and served as lead researcher for Andy Grove’s best-selling book, Only the Paranoid Survive.

Robert holds a BA from UC Berkeley and an MBA from Stanford University. He is married with three grown children.