AN IF DYNAMICS™ BOOK · FORTHCOMING 2026
The Working Ground™
Where leaders find their footing and hold their pace under pressure
A book for leading well through the hard and ordinary week, in the body and in the mind.
Publishing later this year.
A Working Book
A working book, not a reading book. Part guidebook, part workbook, part coaching conversation, designed to be used alongside the pressures you are actually facing, so you can turn what you notice into what you do.
A new book, in the making
The Working Ground™ is my forthcoming book, and the first in an IF Dynamics™ series. It is in editing now, for publication later this year.
The title comes from an idea I keep returning to, with the leaders I coach and in my own work as an entrepreneur. Under pressure, most of us go looking for solid ground, some fixed place to stand until the difficulty passes. Real work rarely offers that. The ground we lead from is working ground: uneven, in motion, changing under our feet. The skill is not to wait for it to settle. It is to find our footing while it moves, and to hold our pace.
Neuroscience is where the rest of it comes from. Pressure is not weather. It has a shape you can learn to read, and much of what it does to your thinking, your steadiness, and your relationships can be transformed.
A companion and guide
The Working Ground™
A working book, not a reading book. Part guidebook, part workbook, part coaching conversation, designed to be used alongside the pressures you are actually facing, so you can turn what you notice into what you do.
What it offers is a repeatable working experience. Every chapter follows the same sequence. It brings you the reasoning behind what you are seeing, then short accounts from practitioners meeting the same pressures in their own working lives, then working sets of questions precise and practical enough to move you, at both the individual and the team level, then small experiments you can test in an ordinary week, with enough space to answer them in your own words, against your own situation, on your own timing.
The Working Ground™ meets you where you are. Some readers arrive knowing exactly what they want to change and needing a way through it. Others arrive with a vaguer sense that something could be better, and no clear name for it yet. Both are good places to start, and the book works from either.
It helps you find your direction, think through your next actions, and shape the mindset and the surroundings that make those actions possible. Everyone is somewhere on their own learning curve. This is a way to keep moving along yours.
Keep it on your desk rather than your shelf. Work in the margins. Come back when something shifts, and notice that the same page reads differently once you have changed.
Follow The Working Ground™ journey
I am sharing the thinking as the book takes shape, over on On The Learning Road™, my publication on leadership, learning, and intelligent movement. Some of the ideas, a few of the coaching questions the book turns on, and the occasional walk into one of the forests that open its chapters.
New pieces will keep coming from now through publication and beyond. If that is the kind of reading you want, subscribe and follow along.
Watch and listen
From time to time I share short videos and conversations about the ideas behind the book, also on On The Learning Road™.
About the author
Isabella Fugaccia is an executive coach, team coach, leadership strategist, and applied neuroscientist. She has built her career between Europe and the United States, and works globally in English and Italian with leaders, emerging leaders, managers, founders, and executives moving through complexity and change. Her work helps them find their footing and hold their pace under pressure, and keep moving forward with rhythm, judgment, and intelligence. The Working Ground™ is her first book.