I used to believe that the best way to lead was to hold things together. I thought my job was to keep every part intact, every person protected, every system polished until it could run like clockwork. But the truth is, some things are not meant to stay whole.
Look around any classroom or campus we’ve built. Beneath every bright mural and polished glass door, there are cracks. Cracks in how we onboard new staff so quickly that we skip the soul work. Cracks in how we chase enrolment targets but sometimes forget the parents who needed an extra hour with our teachers. Cracks in our middle managers, who want to lead but were never shown how to break their old mindsets.
I’ve learned, painfully, that the parts of our system that break are not signs of failure. They’re signs of future growth if we have the courage to let them break properly.
The Hidden Cost of Staying Whole
In the past year, we opened two new Selangor campuses. On paper, they’re beautiful. Purpose-Built Campuses, designed to inspire. But beneath the glass and steel, the same pain points that haunt our older sites found their way back in: NP% gaps that no dashboard can cover if your people don’t trust the numbers. A single HR misalignment that multiplies when you scale too fast. A culture that strains when new teams come in but old systems stay stuck.
Sometimes I ask myself, what would happen if we forced it all to stay intact? Keep every outdated habit just to look stable? It would cost us more than money. It would cost us momentum. It would cost us people who stay too long in roles that have outgrown them, just because we never taught them how to break and rebuild.
I see it now like a gardener sees a dying branch. The branch may look strong from far away. But inside, the rot sets in slowly, quietly, until it kills the tree from within.
A Story of Cracks We Needed
A few months ago, one of our middle managers came to me after a Stellar 1–1. He had been wrestling with his role for months. High performing on the surface, but you could feel the tension under every conversation. He finally said it: “I feel like I’m protecting a system that needs to break. But I don’t know how to break it without breaking myself.”
That one line has haunted me ever since. How many of us spend our whole leadership life preserving what needs to be pruned? How many of us feel the hairline fractures, but we’re too afraid to let them snap open, expose the rot, and let something new grow in its place?
The Paradox That Changes Everything
The real paradox is this: breaking doesn’t weaken us. It thickens our roots.
A bone that breaks and heals becomes stronger at the fracture point. A seed cannot sprout without splitting open first. A bamboo grove thrives because it snaps and bends in the storm.
Stellar’s 2026 vision looks big on paper: new campuses, new verticals, new partnerships. But behind every line item on that plan is a deeper, unspoken commitment: we will break what we must, so we can grow what matters. Not break carelessly, but break intentionally. Break mindsets that keep our people small. Break processes that block real trust. Break the illusion that expansion is just more buildings. It’s not. Expansion is more roots, deeper into the soil of our culture.
Roots That Strengthen When Branches Snap
Years ago, I would have called this a crisis. Now, I call it design. Maxwell reminds us: leadership develops daily, not in a day. Systems do too. A good leader engineers breakage points before the storm does it for him. The Wright brothers didn’t build a plane that could never crash, they built wings that could bend without tearing apart.
In Southeast Asia, we’re raised to fix the crack before the neighbours see it. We worry about face, reputation, losing the trust we’ve fought so hard to earn. But the cost of pretending everything is fine is far worse than the sting of temporary embarrassment. Every leader who tries to hold it all together ends up carrying rot in his hands, wondering why the branch snaps when the weight becomes too much.
When we break the right things at the right time, we make room for new shoots. We create pathways for better people, clearer processes, braver conversations. The cracks reveal where the root system needs to deepen.
Where Do You Need to Break?
This is the tension that keeps me awake at night, but it also keeps me honest with my own leadership: What must I break before it breaks me?
We can keep adding new schools, new verticals, new metrics etc, but if we don’t prune what’s outdated, we’re not scaling, we’re bloating. If we don’t expose the fragile parts, they’ll crumble under real pressure later. And that’s when people pay the price, not the spreadsheets.
Sometimes I wonder what the younger version of me would want to hear now. He’d want permission to break old assumptions. He’d want courage to prune good ideas that distract from great ones. He’d want a leader to remind him that staying whole for the sake of appearances is not strength. It’s slow decay.
The Invitation: Lead What You’re Willing to Break
So here’s my simple invitation for you, for every middle manager, every teacher, every team lead:
Find one thing this quarter you need to let break. It might be a habit that’s protected your comfort. A process that worked when we were smaller, but cracks when we grow. A silo that’s easy to defend but keeps us small.
When you see the fracture, don’t plaster over it with forced optimism. Sit with it. Examine it. Then decide how to break it cleanly, so what comes next grows stronger.
Remember this: the opposite of breaking is not strength. It’s self-preservation that rots from within.
The Reverse That Redefines It All
Every branch we prune, every system we crack open, every belief we dare to shed, they become our roots for tomorrow. This is the paradox every legacy-ready leader must carry:
You can’t grow what you’re not willing to break.
