There is a moment in every senior leader’s career that arrives without warning. The room is full of people waiting for direction. The data sits on the table. The agenda is running on schedule. And somewhere behind the composed exterior, a single thought moves like a fault line: I don’t know.

Not “I need more analysis.” Not “let’s circle back next week.” The real version. The one that feels like professional suicide. The one that gets buried immediately because leadership culture has spent decades rewarding the performance of certainty, even when the answers haven’t arrived yet.

Marie Nordström works exactly in that space. Where complexity has outrun the manual and the leader is left holding responsibility without a map.

The Woman Who Wrote About Strangling Cats

Marie Nordström is the CEO of Brainglobe AB, a certified Positive Psychology Coach, and the author of Chefen som ströp katten och gick hem – The Boss Who Strangled the Cat and Went Home. Published in December 2024 with an English edition arriving this year, the book has been called “a lifesaver” by some readers and has reportedly made executives cry in recognition of what they had been carrying alone.

The cat is not incidental. It represents the chaos leaders try to control – all the unpredictable, living, moving parts of organizational life that refuse to be managed cleanly . The more they grip tighter, the more they choke what they’re trying to protect.

From Life’s Final Conversations to Executive Boxes

Long before Marie Nordström sat across from CEOs wrestling with uncertainty, she sat with terminally ill young adults in the medical field, people facing the ultimate unknown. In those rooms, there were no quick fixes to offer and no clever answers that could make reality disappear. What she learned was how to be present with profound uncertainty without rushing to cover it with false comfort.

Those conversations taught her something that would later define her leadership work: when people are facing their deepest fears, what they need most is not solutions, but someone who can stay in the room and not look away.

Having a University degree in Educational Leadership ,her main focus is to provide external leadership support and often also workshops for the management team and employees. Marie Nordström didn’t arrive at executive advisory through business school. Her foundation was built across nearly two decades in education – as a teacher, special educator, and school principal. That’s where she learned the human truth she now throws in front of senior executives: people become in response to how they are seen.

In schools, the pattern is impossible to ignore. A child labeled “difficult” grows into that role. A child seen as capable and worth the effort grows toward that expectation instead. The environment doesn’t just reflect the person – it shapes them.

When she moved into organizational consulting and founded Brainglobe AB, she found the same pattern wearing different clothes. Executives spoke about headcount, performance curves, and succession plans. The labels were more polished. The effect was identical. People became numbers. Leaders did too.

The Room Nobody Else Offers

The work Marie Nordström does today is built around what she calls mattering-based leadership. Not a wellness initiative or team-building exercise, but the foundational human experience of being seen for who you are, acknowledged for what you contribute, and needed for the good of the whole.

The capacity to sit with difficult truths without rushing to fix them, first learned in those medical field conversations, now anchors her work with executives. She works primarily with CEOs and senior leaders in high-pressure environments where the tempo of decisions consistently threatens to outrun the quality of thinking behind them. Her offering is precise: a room where uncertainty is allowed to exist without the leadership losing its force.

That loneliness isn’t accidental. It’s structural. The higher you rise, the fewer honest conversations you’re permitted. Admitting doubt reads as weakness. So the doubt gets managed in isolation, and decisions get made under conditions heavier than necessary.

Benny Kedén, a digital transformation leader who worked with Nordström, cuts through typical recommendation language: “She always sees things for exactly what they are.” Not comfort. Not validation. Clarity.

When Uncertainty Becomes Speakable

The diagnostic Marie Nordström uses is precise. In leadership teams that have genuinely shifted toward mattering-based culture, one thing becomes visible: uncertainty becomes speakable before it becomes a crisis.

She measures this by watching who speaks in leadership meetings. Who gets interrupted. Whose perspective can change the conversation. Whether weak signals are raised early or buried until they explode.

Her book extends this work through fiction – nine unit managers under pressure. The story format was deliberate.

Recognition before resistance. The story opens the door emotionally before the concept enters intellectually.

The Human Layer Technology Cannot Replace

Marie Nordström completed her Positive Psychology Coach certification in 2026 and is preparing for Neuroscience coaching certification next. Both feed into a question she’s increasingly focused on: what happens to human connection as organizations automate more operations?

Her position is direct. AI can draft, summarize, and optimize. What it cannot do is replace the experience of being genuinely seen. Mattering is the deeply human experience of being seen for who you are, acknowledged for what you contribute, and needed for the good of the whole.

This isn’t a soft concern dressed in leadership language. Stress-related sick leave in Sweden has increased nearly thirty percent in recent years . When people don’t feel they matter, the costs appear in turnover, absence, quiet quitting and leaders carrying too much alone.

The Question the Cat Was Always Asking

The opening tension of this story – a room full of people waiting for answers from a leader who doesn’t have them yet – doesn’t resolve by finding better answers faster. It resolves by building organizations where the question can be asked out loud.

Where uncertainty isn’t leadership failure but the beginning of real responsibility. Where people feel seen enough not to hide, acknowledged enough not to defend their status, and needed enough to contribute beyond their role.

The leaders who will still be standing in ten years are the ones with courage to say “I don’t know” soon enough, and to say it in a room where they still feel they matter.