They Had the Mandate. The Talent. The Vision. But Not the Coherence to Perform at Scale.

International Finance Corporation — a member of the World Bank Group

Jyrki Koskelo could’ve been an Olympic medalist.

No exaggeration. As a kid, he beat a guy who later won silver in the 800 meters. He had that drive, that form, that finish. But his father, practical and proud, steered him toward work. So he carried that performance mindset into the world of finance.

He stepped into the Financial Markets division at IFC with a mandate to move billions—and move them differently. This was about getting private capital into places it rarely went. About making markets work for people they were never built for. His mandate: help unlock private capital as a tool to fight poverty in some of the most underserved markets on Earth. The team he inherited was comfortable. Well-traveled, well-fed, but not moving at the pace he demanded. In a world where closing two or three deals a year made you a star, he wanted five, maybe six. Not once. Every year.

That mindset—run fast, run hard, run smart—wasn’t the problem. The problem was trying to do it alone.

Where It Started—and Why He Called Me

We met through LCI—our Leadership for Collective Intelligence program that we’ve been running for decades. He came through the program in an early cohort, looking for a way to lead through more than just drive. I remember watching him during those first few sessions: intensely focused, internal, processing fast. Not the kind of leader who commands the room with big gestures, but one who listens with his whole body.

LCI challenged him, not because he didn’t get it, but because it asked something different of him. It asked him to slow down. To look inward. To build presence, not just performance. We worked one-on-one as part of his journey through the program, and over time he began to shift. It was less about winning the race alone, more about enabling the field to run.

When the opportunity came for him to step into leadership at the IFC, he didn’t want to repeat old patterns. He wanted to build something that could hold pace and purpose at once. So he called me. He didn’t want me just to coach him, but to help design the thing itself.

Meeting Him Where He Ran

He grew up in Finland, where long winters built stamina and quiet built focus. Running became his language before leadership did. As a student, he was an 800-meter runner—tall, fast, relentless. Not just strong, but strategic. If you know that race, you know it demands both: all-out speed, and just enough restraint to survive the second lap.

He trained for it the way he would later lead: with intensity. With discipline. But in a household where labor was sacred and sport was seen as play, his running didn’t get the encouragement it might have elsewhere. So when his father steered him away from the track, he stepped instead into business. What stayed with him was the engine, and the edge.

He came to lead a department within the International Finance Corporation—the arm of the World Bank Group that mobilizes private investment for development. And let’s be precise here: the IFC isn’t a private-sector company, but it exists to bring private capital into public goals. Their job is to make markets work for countries who have been left out of them.

G5, G20: Leadership Becomes a Passing Game

We started by naming his core team: the G5. Five people who could run with him, each with different strengths, each with different gears. Some could match his pace for hours. Some needed to move in bursts. All were essential.

Each of them then held stewardship over a part of what we called the G20—twenty managers who held critical portfolios or regions. We started thinking of it like a market itself—layers that could price risk, carry flow, hold shape. A system that could talk to itself. The G5 became a core container. The G20 became the cascade.

We didn’t assign this top-down. We used real dialogue to figure out who belonged where. We mapped affinities, not org charts. And over time, it held.

Before the G5, every strategic call was routed to Jyrki. After? Authority lived closer to the work, with clearer accountability and less delay. People stepped into authority—and stayed there.

I remember watching the G5 come together. The way James would look to Rosie before answering. The way Georgina gave others space, then landed something clear. You could feel it, like a pick-up game that just starts to click.

Tree Shakers and Jelly Makers

Now, that name? That one comes from an old preacher I knew down South. He used to say: “Some folks are tree shakers. Others are jelly makers.”

Our guy? Pure tree shaker. Full of ideas, energy, force. He’d shake loose a dozen ideas in a single meeting. But who was going to gather the fruit? Boil it down? Make it edible for the rest of the system?

That’s where we needed to look harder. We found them, bit by bit. James, who could go with him on a trip to Senegal, land, shower, and be sharp in a meeting 30 minutes later. Mumtah, who could shape complexity into something coherent. Georgina, who had the bones of a builder and the heart of a healer. And Rosie, who created the kind of culture where people could catch their breath and not break.

Later, a woman stepped into the short-term financing role and blew everyone away with the instruments she designed. That’s jelly making. And that’s how you turn a strategy into something that feeds a whole organization.

You need both. And you need the structure that lets each one do their part, without trying to be each other.

Learning to Dance

We worked not just on hierarchy, but on rhythm. How do decisions flow? Who speaks to whom, when, and how? We trained the G5 not just to lead, but to translate—up, down, and sideways. We worked on designing meetings: when to download, when to generate, when to move.

And perhaps most importantly, we worked on feedback. How to challenge without collision. How to say, “Can we take this offline?” and mean it. How to stay in the conversation, even when the stakes are high.

We created time and space for honest dialogue. Some of the best conversations happened not in the conference room, but just after Jyrki’s midday run, when his energy had reset and his ears were open. Others happened in small groups, structured around the question: What does it mean to be effective in this culture, with this leader, on this mission?

Over time, the team stopped chasing the leader. They started trusting each other. And then, they started running.

What Held—And What Moved

I grew up watching leaders who could command a room. That matters. But this work showed me that leadership lives in something quieter. It lives in spacing. In timing. In the ability to pass the ball and to know when not to.

In soccer (proper football, as my friends have convinced me to call it)—or in the NBA at its best—it’s not the brilliance of any one player that wins. It’s connection. Field awareness. Trust in the timing. You defend the goal together. You move in sync, knowing when to run, when to hold position, when to pass without looking.

This wasn’t about telling people where to stand. It was about building a way of working they could believe in—and walk into with both feet.

Here’s what I carry forward from this work:

• You can’t scale performance until you build real trust—across the whole
  system.
• Structure matters, but rhythm and timing matter more.
• The best leaders know when to step back, and let others carry the
  pace.
• Great teams don’t just run fast. They move together. When that coherence
  clicks, it feels less like managing a team and more like moving as one
  body.

I think about that preacher from my childhood a lot these days. He probably never saw a balance sheet in his life, but he knew something fundamental about systems.  It doesn’t matter whether you’re a tree-shaker or a jelly maker, the trick is knowing which you are, and letting the other do their thing without trying to fix it.

What we built wasn’t scaffolding. It was a system tuned to coherence, speed, and trust.