Once the consequences are visible, it becomes much easier to identify the warning signs and recognise the moments when someone could have chosen differently. Information that seemed ambiguous at the time now appears significant, while decisions that once seemed reasonable can become difficult to understand.

We look back and wonder why nobody saw what was coming, why someone didn’t ask another question, or why the person responsible continued when there were apparently good reasons to stop.

Sometimes those questions are justified. People make poor decisions, overlook information they should have considered and allow their judgement to be influenced by things that have little to do with the problem in front of them. Experience and seniority don’t make anyone immune to that.

But we move rather quickly from knowing that a decision produced a poor outcome to assuming that the decision itself was poor, without spending much time reconstructing the conditions in which it was originally made.

The advantage of knowing what happened

One of the difficulties with evaluating decisions after the event is that we already know something the person making the decision didn’t.

We know how things turned out, and that knowledge changes how we interpret almost everything that came before it. Psychologists describe this through hindsight and outcome bias, although the practical problem is familiar enough: once we know what happened, it’s difficult to recover what the situation looked like before the outcome was known.

A warning that was one of several competing signals becomes the warning that should have changed everything. An alternative course of action begins to look more attractive because we can now imagine it avoiding the consequences we’ve witnessed.

Someone can make a carefully considered decision, recognise the uncertainty and still arrive at an outcome they would have preferred to avoid. Another person might overlook important information, take an unreasonable risk and find that circumstances happen to work in their favour.

If we only examine what happened afterwards, we risk learning the wrong lessons from both.

And in organisations, the process that produced the decision often begins long before the person responsible makes the final choice.

What information actually reached the decision?

I’ve written before about what happens to information as it moves through an organisation, especially when observations are progressively summarised and prepared for people further away from the original source.

There are good reasons for doing this. Senior leaders cannot reasonably examine every detail of every problem, and organisations need ways of reducing complexity so that people can make decisions without becoming overwhelmed by information.

But every act of simplification involves judgement about what matters, what can be removed and how much uncertainty should accompany the final recommendation.

A concern raised by someone close to the work might initially be expressed as a possibility, supported by incomplete observations and accompanied by several competing explanations. By the time it reaches a senior decision-maker, that concern may have become a risk rating, a line in a report or a brief comment in a presentation.

Nothing necessarily dishonest has happened. Each person may have made a reasonable judgement about what the next person needed to know, while the organisation gradually loses the context that would have helped someone understand the original uncertainty.

When the decision eventually goes wrong, we may discover that the warning signs were there all along.

Someone had raised the issue, a report contained the relevant information, or a discussion had taken place several weeks earlier. We can trace the evidence backwards through the organisation and establish that the information existed before the decision was made.

But information existing somewhere in an organisation isn’t the same as that information being available, understandable and appropriately weighted by the person responsible for acting on it.

That distinction becomes uncomfortable when we start asking who decided what the decision-maker needed to see, and whether the uncertainty was preserved as the information moved.

The person who eventually approved the decision may have been working with an account of the situation that was internally consistent, professionally presented and incomplete in ways that nobody had intended.

We can still question whether they asked enough of the information in front of them. But we should also be interested in what happened to that information before it arrived.

The conditions surrounding the decision

Information is only part of the problem, because decisions are rarely made in circumstances where someone has unlimited time or unrestricted authority to explore every possible alternative.

A person may be expected to commit to a delivery date before the resources required to meet it have been confirmed. They might recognise a concern but hesitate to raise it because doing so could jeopardise work that other parts of the organisation are depending upon.

These circumstances don’t necessarily indicate a lack of judgement. They describe situations in which judgement is being exercised alongside competing obligations and consequences that extend beyond the immediate decision.

Time pressure is an obvious influence, although we sometimes treat it as an unavoidable feature of working life without asking where it came from.

Some decisions genuinely need to be made quickly. The circumstances are changing, opportunities are disappearing or delaying action would create greater risk than proceeding with the information available.

Other decisions become urgent because something was delayed earlier, because responsibilities were unclear or because the organisation has developed a habit of postponing difficult conversations until there are very few options left.

By the time the final decision reaches someone, the available time may be so limited that the opportunity for meaningful judgement has already narrowed.

We then evaluate the person responsible for making the decision under pressure, without necessarily examining the earlier decisions that created that pressure.

Organisations are often comfortable assigning accountability for the final choice, while responsibility for the conditions surrounding it remains distributed across people who may not even recognise their contribution.

The person whose name appears against the decision is visible.

The people who shaped the available options may not be.

What people learn about challenging decisions

There is another influence that can be harder to identify, because it concerns what people have learned about the consequences of exercising their judgement.

Most organisations say they want people to speak up and challenge assumptions. Those expectations appear in leadership programmes and conversations about psychological safety, often with considerable emphasis on openness and constructive disagreement.

But people also learn from what happens around them.

They notice whether questions are genuinely welcomed when a decision is moving towards approval, or whether those questions are treated as an obstacle to progress. They notice what happens when someone raises a concern that turns out to be unfounded, and whether a person who recommends delaying a decision receives the same support as someone who confidently commits to delivery.

They also learn which kinds of uncertainty are acceptable to express, especially in front of senior people.

An organisation doesn’t need to explicitly discourage disagreement for people to become more selective about when they challenge something. A few experiences of being dismissed or criticised for slowing progress can influence what someone is prepared to say the next time.

And those experiences don’t necessarily produce silence.

Someone might still participate enthusiastically in meetings and appear entirely comfortable contributing to discussions. They may simply become more careful about which concerns they raise, how strongly they express them and whether they’re prepared to recommend a course of action that differs from what they believe their leaders want.

From the outside, the organisation may appear to have a healthy decision-making culture. People contribute, meetings reach conclusions and decisions move forward.

What becomes difficult to see is the judgement people chose not to exercise, the uncertainty they decided not to share and the alternatives that were never seriously considered because someone had already learned that pursuing them carried a personal cost.

A leader might interpret the absence of disagreement as evidence that people support the decision, without recognising how previous experiences have influenced what people are willing to contribute. Some of those experiences may have seemed entirely unremarkable to the leader at the time.

The decisions that came before

When something goes wrong, organisations often respond by trying to improve the decision-making process.

They introduce additional approvals, strengthen reporting requirements or establish clearer escalation procedures. People may be asked to document the reasoning behind important choices so that future decisions can be examined more closely.

Some of those changes may be necessary, especially when the original problem involved inadequate scrutiny or a failure to recognise significant risks.

But the response can make the conditions for future decisions more difficult.

An additional approval might improve oversight while reducing the authority of someone closer to the work. A new reporting requirement might preserve useful information while creating another opportunity for uncertainty to be simplified or removed.

Greater scrutiny of unsuccessful decisions might improve accountability, while making people less willing to exercise judgement when the outcome cannot be guaranteed.

The same intervention can solve one problem and create another, depending on how it changes the experience of making decisions.

This is why it matters to examine the decisions that came before.

Who established the deadline, and what assumptions were made about the time available? Who decided which information was relevant, and how was uncertainty communicated? What alternatives were realistically available, and what had people learned about the consequences of challenging the preferred approach?

These questions don’t necessarily lead to the conclusion that the original decision was reasonable. We may discover that someone ignored credible evidence or failed to consult people who could have helped. They may have allowed their preferences to outweigh the information available, despite having the authority and opportunity to act differently.

If that’s what happened, accountability matters.

But we might also discover that the person was making a choice between several unattractive options, working with information that had lost important context and responding to expectations that had developed long before they became responsible for the decision.

In that case, focusing exclusively on their judgement leaves much of the explanation untouched.

And it may leave the conditions that contributed to the decision exactly as they were.

What are we actually holding people accountable for?

The quality of a decision depends partly on the individual making it, but also on the information they receive and the choices genuinely available to them.

Some of those conditions sit within their control. Others are created by people who may never be asked to explain their contribution to the outcome.

This may be one reason organisations can spend considerable time reviewing unsuccessful decisions without improving the conditions in which future decisions will be made.

We identify the point at which something went wrong, establish who was responsible and decide what should happen differently next time. The review may be thorough, the recommendations sensible and the people involved genuinely committed to learning from what happened.

Yet the next person making a similar decision may encounter much the same constraints, receive information that has passed through the same processes and anticipate the same consequences if they challenge what others expect.

When we look back, the decision may seem difficult to defend, especially now that we know what happened.

But before deciding what someone should have done differently, I’d want to understand what the situation looked like from where they were standing, and how much of that situation had already been decided for them.

We notice the fatigue, the stress, the declining engagement. Sometimes we notice an increase in absence, mistakes or people leaving. More often, we notice nothing particularly unusual because the work is still getting done, and as long as that continues, there isn’t always an obvious reason to question what’s happening beneath the surface.

Eventually, someone decides that something needs to change.

So we introduce a resilience programme. Perhaps some mindfulness training, a workshop on managing stress, or access to an app that encourages people to sleep better, move more and develop healthier habits.

None of these things is inherently bad. I’ve spent much of my career helping people develop the physical and psychological resources to perform under pressure, and there is considerable value in learning how to manage yourself when the demands of life and work increase.

But I keep coming back to a question.

What happens when we help people become better at managing the demands of their work, without examining the demands themselves?

What the performance isn’t telling you

My background is in strength and conditioning, and one of the things you learn through years of coaching is that the performance someone produces doesn’t always tell you how well they’re coping with the demands placed upon them.

An athlete might still be hitting their prescribed training loads, completing every session and producing the numbers you expect, while other things are beginning to change.

Perhaps the same weight is starting to feel heavier. They need longer between sets, their movement becomes less consistent as fatigue accumulates, or they’re finding it harder to generate the same intent during sessions. They might mention unusual soreness between sessions, difficulty concentrating or feeling less recovered than normal.

None of those observations tells you everything, and any one of them might have a perfectly reasonable explanation. But together, especially when you understand what’s normal for that athlete, they give you a reason to look more closely.

You start asking about the training programme, the accumulated workload, the opportunities for recovery and what else is happening outside training. Perhaps they’ve been travelling, sleeping badly or dealing with something difficult at home. Perhaps the programme hasn’t changed at all, but their capacity to respond to it has.

The point isn’t that every difficult session requires an adjustment, or that the athlete should never experience fatigue. Training creates fatigue, and adaptation requires demands that challenge someone’s existing capacity.

It’s that you don’t assume everything is fine simply because the athlete is still completing the work.

Yet in organisations, that assumption can become remarkably comfortable.

The person is still delivering, so the system must be working.

The work has a cost

One of the more useful models in occupational psychology is the Job Demands-Resources model, commonly referred to as JD-R. At its simplest, it examines the demands associated with work and the resources people have available to meet them.

Those demands might include workload, emotional pressure, conflicting expectations, difficult decisions or the sustained concentration required to solve complex problems. Resources might include autonomy, support from colleagues, clear priorities, appropriate tools, feedback and opportunities to develop.

The model is useful because it doesn’t assume that demanding work is inherently harmful. Some demands can be engaging and motivating, especially when people have the resources and opportunities to meet them. The difficulty comes when demands remain high, resources are insufficient, and the relationship between the two begins to affect someone’s health, motivation or ability to sustain their performance.

Consider someone leading a complex project. They have a demanding client, several competing deadlines and a team that depends on them for decisions. Under the right conditions, they might find the work thoroughly engaging.

Then the client changes the scope, a senior leader introduces another priority, someone leaves the team and isn’t replaced. An approval process becomes more complicated, while meetings multiply because everyone wants reassurance that things are progressing.

The work hasn’t simply increased. The conditions surrounding it have changed, although the expectations placed upon the person responsible may remain exactly the same.

They might respond by working longer hours, becoming more available, taking on decisions that would previously have been shared or finding ways around processes that aren’t working.

And because the project continues to progress, those adjustments can be interpreted as evidence of competence and commitment.

Nobody necessarily sees what they’re costing.

When capability hides the problem

I’ve become increasingly interested in what happens when organisations depend on capable people to compensate for the conditions in which they’re working.

Someone who is experienced, conscientious and good at solving problems can absorb a remarkable amount of friction before it becomes visible to anyone else. They anticipate difficulties, manage competing expectations, find alternative routes when something gets stuck and quietly take responsibility for things that might otherwise fall between people or departments.

Often, these are exactly the people organisations value most.

They become the person everyone goes to when something needs sorting out, and over time, their ability to keep things moving becomes part of how the organisation operates.

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with being dependable, and there can be considerable satisfaction in being someone others trust. The difficulty comes when that dependability starts to conceal problems that would otherwise require attention.

A process doesn’t need fixing because someone knows how to get around it. Conflicting priorities don’t need resolving because someone keeps finding the time. A shortage of resources doesn’t become urgent because the work continues to get done.

And the more reliably they deliver, the easier it becomes to give them something else.

Sometimes the behaviours we recognise as evidence of high performance are also the behaviours allowing poorly designed work to continue.

I don’t think this always happens because leaders are indifferent to the people doing the work. In many cases, they may have little visibility of what it takes to keep things moving, especially when the people carrying that responsibility have become very good at making the difficulties disappear.

Which makes the output a rather unreliable indicator of what’s happening underneath it.

Why people keep delivering

Why do people continue absorbing these demands, sometimes long after the work has become difficult to sustain?

Self-Determination Theory offers a useful way of examining that question. Developed through the work of Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, it identifies autonomy, competence and relatedness as basic psychological needs, and distinguishes between different qualities of motivation.

Someone might work hard because they find the work meaningful, enjoy the challenge and feel a genuine sense of ownership over what they’re doing. Their motivation is relatively autonomous, even when the work itself is demanding.

Another person might produce the same level of effort because they’re worried about disappointing someone, damaging their reputation or being seen as incapable of handling the responsibility they’ve been given. Their behaviour may be driven more by pressure and obligation.

And these aren’t mutually exclusive experiences.

Someone can love their work, take pride in being dependable and feel increasingly trapped by the expectations that have developed around their reliability. They may want to deliver because the work matters to them, while also feeling that they have very little choice about how much they’re expected to carry.

From the outside, all of this can look like commitment.

The work gets done, the deadlines are met and the person continues to demonstrate the behaviours we’ve come to associate with high performance.

But the reasons sustaining that effort can be quite different, and those differences matter for how people experience their work over time.

Which presents leaders with a difficult question.

How do you distinguish between someone who is genuinely engaged and someone who feels increasingly unable to stop, when both are producing exactly what you’ve asked of them?

What leaders can actually influence

I don’t think you can answer that question by looking at performance data alone, and asking people whether they’re coping may not tell you much either, especially when being dependable has become part of how they see themselves.

You need to understand something about their experience of the work, including the decisions they’re making, the difficulties they’re absorbing and the degree of influence they feel they have over what’s expected of them.

This is where autonomy-supportive leadership becomes relevant.

At its heart, it involves taking someone’s perspective seriously, explaining the reasoning behind decisions, supporting their capability and giving them meaningful influence over the things they can reasonably control.

It also gives you a way of seeing what delivering the work actually requires.

Imagine a deadline changing halfway through a project.

The leader might have very little control over the new deadline, particularly if the decision has come from a client or somewhere further up the organisation. But they still influence how the team experiences that change.

They can simply communicate the new expectation and leave people to work out how to meet it, or they can explain what’s changed, acknowledge the disruption and involve the team in deciding how the remaining work should be organised.

That conversation might reveal that someone has already been working evenings to keep the project on schedule, that an approval process is creating delays nobody further up the organisation has noticed, or that meeting the new deadline means something else will have to give.

Without the conversation, those adjustments might simply continue.

The leader may still have to hold the deadline, but they now have a better understanding of what meeting it requires, and the team has greater influence over how they respond.

Something similar happens when people make mistakes.

If every mistake leads to greater oversight, tighter controls and fewer opportunities to exercise judgement, people may become increasingly reluctant to make decisions for themselves. They learn that avoiding mistakes is safer than taking responsibility, especially when the consequences of getting something wrong are more visible than the benefits of getting it right.

A leader who takes time to understand the decision, the information available and the conditions in which it was made has an opportunity to learn something about the work itself, rather than simply correcting the person responsible.

They can still hold someone accountable while helping them develop the judgement and capability to handle a similar situation in the future.

These aren’t especially dramatic interventions. They’re ordinary decisions about how work is organised, how people are treated and how much influence they have over what they’re expected to deliver.

They also give leaders access to information that performance reports rarely capture.

And unlike a resilience workshop, they don’t require everyone to find additional time to participate.

Looking beyond the output

I still believe there’s considerable value in helping people develop their physical and psychological capacity to handle demanding situations. That work has occupied much of my career, and I don’t see it becoming any less relevant.

But I also know that when an athlete continues to complete their training, the numbers alone aren’t enough to tell me whether the demands remain appropriate. I need to understand what producing those numbers is costing them, and whether something has changed that I haven’t accounted for.

I’m not sure we always bring the same curiosity to organisational performance.

When someone continues to deliver, especially someone who has built a reputation for being capable and dependable, it’s easy to assume that the demands we’re placing upon them are manageable.

We might even praise them for how well they’re handling everything.

And perhaps they are.

But how would we know what they’re having to absorb to make that performance possible, if we never look beyond the work getting done?

The author was discussing the familiar claim that people are an organisation’s greatest asset, and the rather less convincing relationship between that claim and how organisations actually operate. They observed that responsibility for employees’ needs is frequently delegated to human resources, where those needs are addressed through programmes covering leadership development, work-life balance, wellness, flexibility and engagement. These programmes are often among the first things to disappear when budgets come under pressure.

But it was the final observation that stayed with me. Organisations frequently fail to make the connection between how well they meet employees’ needs and how effectively those employees perform.

I’ve spent much of my professional life working with human performance, initially in sport and more recently with people operating in demanding corporate environments. The observation felt familiar, although I found myself questioning something slightly different from the point the author was making.

When did wellbeing and performance become separate organisational conversations? And why have we become so comfortable treating them that way?

In sport, the relationship between performance and the condition of the person delivering it is difficult to overlook. Training load, sleep, recovery, fatigue and readiness are all part of the performance conversation. A coach considering what to ask of an athlete tomorrow needs some understanding of what that athlete has already done, how they’ve responded and what they’re likely to be capable of doing next.

That doesn’t mean sport has solved the problem. Athletes are still pushed beyond what they can reasonably sustain, warning signs are missed and short-term results can take precedence over long-term health. But the relationship between the demands being imposed and the capacity available to meet them is at least recognised as something worth examining.

A training programme isn’t evaluated solely by whether the athlete completed the prescribed work. The response to that work matters, because what happens afterwards influences what the athlete can do next.

There is an obvious difference between preparing someone for a sporting competition and managing people within a complex organisation, and I wouldn’t want to pretend the principles transfer neatly from one environment to another. Still, the contrast has become increasingly apparent to me.

In many organisations, performance is discussed through targets, productivity, accountability and delivery, while wellbeing appears elsewhere on the agenda, usually alongside engagement, mental health, resilience and employee benefits. The people involved in those conversations may be different, as are the budgets and the measures used to determine whether anything is improving.

We have developed separate systems for managing what people are expected to deliver and supporting the people expected to deliver it.

There are sensible historical reasons for this. As organisations grew, specialist functions emerged to manage increasingly complex responsibilities, and employee wellbeing gradually became part of the remit of human resources. Specialisation brought expertise and accountability, but it also influenced how problems were understood and where responsibility for addressing them was located.

When performance deteriorates, the organisation might examine processes, targets, management capability or the resources available to complete the work. When employees report stress or fatigue, the response may involve wellbeing initiatives, resilience training or access to additional support. Sometimes those responses are appropriate, but the separation becomes problematic when the two issues are connected and the organisation has no obvious way of examining that relationship.

Consider something as ordinary as meetings.

A manager might have good reasons for arranging regular updates, another department might need information to support its own decisions, and senior leaders may introduce additional reporting requirements to improve visibility across the business. Individually, none of these decisions needs to be unreasonable. Yet their cumulative effect can leave employees with increasingly fragmented working days, fewer opportunities for sustained concentration and growing pressure to complete their actual work outside normal hours.

The organisation may eventually recognise the consequences through employee feedback, engagement surveys or rising concerns about workload. At that point, support might be offered to help people manage stress, establish boundaries or improve their ability to focus. Those interventions may be useful, but they don’t necessarily change the organisational decisions that created the conditions in the first place.

Once wellbeing becomes a programme, it acquires many of the characteristics of any other organisational activity. It has an owner, a budget, objectives and measures intended to demonstrate whether the investment is worthwhile. We can establish how many employees attended a workshop, how satisfied they were with the experience and how much the organisation spent providing it.

The programme becomes visible in a way that many of the conditions influencing employee wellbeing are not.

The cost of a resilience workshop appears in a budget. Someone is accountable for that expenditure, and when financial pressure increases, the organisation can decide whether to continue funding it. The cost of fragmented attention is much harder to identify.

It might appear through slower decisions, avoidable mistakes, reduced creativity or work that takes longer than it should. Fatigue may accumulate across weeks or months, affecting how people interact with colleagues, respond to unexpected demands or approach difficult problems. These consequences are rarely attributable to a single decision, and they may not appear in any report that identifies their relationship with the conditions of work.

A leader can see what the wellbeing programme costs without necessarily seeing what the absence of adequate recovery, autonomy or uninterrupted working time is costing the organisation. The asymmetry matters because organisations tend to manage what they can identify, measure and assign responsibility for.

It also creates a peculiar situation in which the expenditure intended to support human performance can be scrutinised more directly than the everyday organisational practices that may be undermining it.

We can measure whether someone completed the work expected of them, just as we can record whether an athlete completed a training session. What we’re less accustomed to examining in organisations is how the person responded to that work, and what the experience means for their capacity to perform again tomorrow.

In sport, we recognise that capability and readiness are not quite the same thing. An athlete may possess the physical and technical abilities required to perform, but their capacity to express those abilities will vary depending on training demands, recovery, health and numerous other factors. The same distinction exists in professional life, although we don’t always give it equivalent attention.

Someone can have the knowledge, experience and motivation required for their role while struggling to apply those capabilities consistently. Their working environment may demand constant task switching, offer little control over priorities or create uncertainty that consumes attention before they reach the work that matters. Equally, a demanding period can be productive and meaningful when someone has sufficient support, autonomy and capacity to meet the challenge.

This is why I find the familiar suggestion that organisations need to balance wellbeing and performance unhelpful. It implies a trade-off between two competing priorities, when in practice the relationship is far more complicated.

Wellbeing is not a synonym for comfort, just as performance is not a synonym for working harder.

The demands placed upon people matter, but so do the resources available to meet them, the meaning attached to the work and the conditions in which it takes place. There are times when increased demands contribute to development and achievement, and others when they gradually erode the very capacities required to perform well. Understanding the difference seems rather more useful than treating wellbeing as a separate consideration to be addressed once performance expectations have already been established.

This also raises questions about responsibility.

If wellbeing is primarily understood as something HR provides, leaders elsewhere in the organisation can support those initiatives without necessarily examining how their own decisions influence the conditions employees experience. A manager might encourage participation in wellbeing activities while maintaining working practices that leave people with little opportunity to recover. A leadership team might express concern about employee fatigue while introducing additional priorities without removing existing commitments.

These contradictions don’t necessarily reflect indifference. Managers operate within their own demands and constraints, and many have limited freedom to change the systems they’re expected to work within. But the consequences of organisational decisions don’t remain neatly contained within the functions responsible for making them. They accumulate across teams, working relationships and individual lives, often becoming visible only when performance or wellbeing has already deteriorated.

And by then, identifying which decisions contributed to the problem can be remarkably difficult.

Appropriate wellbeing support still matters, particularly when people face difficulties that changes to work design cannot resolve, and demanding work will always involve some degree of pressure and discomfort.

There is also a limit to how far organisational performance should be used to justify concern for people’s wellbeing. Employees have lives, relationships and needs that extend beyond their contribution to an employer, and those things matter regardless of whether they produce a measurable commercial benefit.

But none of this explains why organisations have become so accustomed to examining the results of work separately from the conditions in which that work takes place.

When a business discusses increasing productivity, it seems reasonable to examine what that increase will demand of the people expected to deliver it. When priorities change, we might consider what happens to the commitments already occupying people’s time. And when performance begins to deteriorate, the working environment deserves at least as much attention as the capability or motivation of the individual.

These aren’t radical questions, although answering them may require organisations to examine decisions that currently sit outside the responsibility of whoever manages employee wellbeing.

Perhaps that’s one reason we’ve become so comfortable treating wellbeing as something organisations provide, rather than examining how the organisation itself influences people’s experience of work.

We have made the programmes visible, while many of the conditions that make them necessary remain much harder to see.

Their calendars fill with meetings, conversations, decisions and requests for advice. Most of these interactions are reasonable, many are necessary, and some will be considerably more valuable than anything they might have been doing otherwise.

But I wonder how often we consider what that availability costs.

When you ask a colleague for fifteen minutes, the transaction seems straightforward. You have something you need to discuss, they have experience or information that might help, and fifteen minutes seems a reasonable amount of time to ask for.

You receive an answer, some reassurance or perhaps a decision that allows you to continue.

What you can’t necessarily see is what those fifteen minutes displaced.

Perhaps they were working through a difficult problem. Perhaps they were considering something that hadn’t yet developed into a question worth asking. Or perhaps they were doing something entirely routine, and your conversation was a much better use of their time.

You don’t know. And in most cases, you have little reason to find out.

The person making the request receives an immediate benefit, while much of the cost is carried elsewhere. There may be no obvious consequence, no visible loss and nobody who feels particularly responsible for what didn’t happen.

And if something important was missed, the consequences may not become apparent until much later, by which point nobody can trace them back to the competing demands on someone’s attention.

As responsibilities increase, so does the number of people who want access to you. Your perspective becomes useful in more conversations. Your involvement can help resolve uncertainty, move decisions forward or reassure people that they’re heading in the right direction.

And being needed can feel rather good.

I suspect most of us are more susceptible to this than we’d care to admit.

There’s satisfaction in being the person people turn to when something is difficult. It reinforces the sense that our experience matters, that our presence makes a difference, that we’re contributing something useful.

But being needed and being valuable aren’t necessarily the same thing.

A person might become central to an organisation because they consistently exercise exceptional judgement. They might also become central because the organisation has gradually arranged itself around their involvement.

Both situations can look remarkably similar.

People seek their advice. Decisions pass through them. Their calendar is full, and their absence is noticed.

From the outside, that can look like influence.

It might be.

Yet there’s a difference between someone whose contribution is difficult to replace and someone whose involvement has become necessary for ordinary work to continue.

We tend to regard indispensability as a compliment, although I’m not sure we’ve given enough consideration to what it might tell us about the organisation.

If every important decision requires the same person’s involvement, is that evidence of their exceptional capability? Or have we created a system in which other people have gradually stopped exercising their own judgement?

The answer may be uncomfortable for the person at the centre of it.

Each time we answer a question someone could have worked through themselves, we reinforce the expectation that we’ll answer the next one. Each time we become involved in a decision because our presence provides reassurance, we make it a little more difficult for that decision to happen without us.

None of this requires anyone to behave badly.

The person seeking advice wants to make a good decision. The leader wants to help. The organisation wants appropriate oversight, and involving someone experienced can reduce uncertainty.

Over time, those individual decisions establish expectations that nobody consciously chose.

People become accustomed to asking. Leaders become accustomed to answering. What began as a useful exchange of judgement becomes part of how work gets done.

Eventually, the arrangement starts to look less like a choice and more like a requirement.

And perhaps the person at the centre has become so accustomed to being consulted that they no longer question whether they need to be.

Part of the responsibility of senior leadership is responding to what is happening now. People need decisions, problems need resolving, and organisations cannot operate on the assumption that everyone should be left alone to think.

But another part of the responsibility is noticing what isn’t yet demanding attention.

An emerging pattern across several teams. A decision that seems sensible in isolation but creates problems elsewhere. An assumption that has become so familiar nobody thinks to question it.

These things don’t necessarily arrive as requests. They may not have an obvious owner, a deadline or a place on the agenda.

Sometimes they only become apparent when someone has the opportunity to consider what several apparently unrelated conversations might mean collectively.

And that creates a problem.

The work that is easiest to request and schedule can gradually occupy the attention of the people we expect to notice things that nobody has thought to request.

We can measure how quickly someone responds, how many decisions they make or how many meetings they attend. We have a much harder time establishing whether their attention was directed towards the things that mattered most.

A meeting that didn’t happen is visible in a calendar.

An insight that never developed isn’t.

This is where I think much of the familiar advice about managing time becomes unsatisfying.

Protect your calendar. Decline unnecessary meetings. Set boundaries. Create space for strategic thinking.

None of it is particularly unreasonable, but it places responsibility on the individual to manage a problem that may have been created collectively.

If an organisation expects its senior people to be accessible, responsive and involved, then someone who makes themselves less available may simply be perceived as less engaged.

And if a leader has become the person everyone consults, protecting their time doesn’t automatically give other people the confidence or authority to make decisions without them.

The dependency remains. Only access to the person has changed.

There’s also a risk in treating thinking as something that happens separately from the rest of leadership. Some of the most valuable insights emerge through conversations we hadn’t anticipated, and an interruption can reveal something we would never have discovered alone.

Judgement develops through contact with people and circumstances. The difficulty is that we rarely know in advance which interactions will matter.

But we do know that attention is finite, and that every request for someone’s involvement competes with other possible uses of it.

We can usually explain why someone needed to be involved in a particular conversation. The question was important, the decision carried risk, or their experience would help.

It’s much harder to explain what their involvement in hundreds of such conversations might have prevented them from noticing.

A question that doesn’t get explored. A connection that isn’t made. A problem that remains unnoticed until it becomes urgent enough to demand everyone’s attention.

When a forager finds a good source of food, it returns to the hive and performs what is known as the waggle dance, communicating information about where the food is so that other bees can go and exploit the discovery. It is an extraordinarily effective information system, but what matters here is what the colony doesn’t do next.

It doesn’t send every available bee to the best-known source of food.

Some keep looking elsewhere.

Viewed through the narrow lens of immediate efficiency, this seems slightly ridiculous. There is food there. We know there is food there because other bees have been there and returned successfully, so why waste perfectly good bees flying around looking for something that may not exist when you already have evidence of something that does?

Because the colony has two different problems to solve at the same time. It needs to exploit what it already knows while continuing to explore what it doesn’t, and those two activities require different relationships with evidence.

I was listening to Rory Sutherland talk about this recently, and it struck me that organisations have exactly the same problem, except we seem to have developed a sophisticated preference for the first half.

We measure, benchmark and analyse historical performance. We look at what customers bought, which products performed best, where margins were strongest and what worked last year, then use all of that information to decide where resources should go next.

None of which is stupid. In fact, it is probably precisely what we should do when the future looks sufficiently like the past.

The problem begins when we use the same logic to decide what we might do differently.

Almost all of the evidence available to us is evidence about something that has already happened. It can tell us an enormous amount about where we have been, but its authority becomes less obvious when the question changes from what happened? to what might be possible?

That creates an awkward asymmetry inside organisations because exploitation can arrive at the meeting carrying spreadsheets, while exploration tends to arrive carrying a hypothesis.

One looks rather more responsible than the other.

I recognise this tension from a completely different part of my career.

I spent many years working in strength and conditioning, where there has always been a complicated relationship between science and practice. A mentor of mine used to talk about where someone sat on the “pracademic” spectrum, with the pure academic at one end and the pure practitioner at the other.

The distinction wasn’t really about whether you believed in science. Most of the best practitioners I knew cared deeply about it. It was more about the relationship you had with what the science could currently tell you.

I saw this most clearly in the way we programmed training.

For years I wrote programmes specifying what an athlete was supposed to do on a particular day. Exercises, sets, repetitions, loads. On paper, there was a plan.

Then the athlete walked through the door.

Some days they were exactly where the programme expected them to be. Other days they weren’t. They had played more minutes than expected, slept badly, picked up a knock, travelled, trained harder elsewhere in the week, or simply looked different when they started moving.

You could collect information around that. We did. But there was never enough information to remove the decision.

At some point you had to decide whether the number you had written several days earlier deserved more authority than what you were seeing in front of you.

That is essentially what autoregulation allowed us to do. The programme still mattered, but it became a starting proposition rather than something that had to be obeyed. Load, volume or sometimes the session itself could change as new information appeared.

Looking back, we weren’t abandoning evidence when we did that. We were responding to evidence that hadn’t existed when the programme was written.

Nor could we know with certainty that the adjustment was correct. Perhaps the athlete could have completed the original session perfectly well. Perhaps reducing the load unnecessarily cost us an adaptation. The decision was being made with incomplete information either way.

But those decisions also taught us something. Over time, you learned more about the athlete in front of you partly because you had adjusted, observed what happened and carried what you saw into the next decision. Some of what you eventually knew could only be learned by acting before you knew it.

There is a difference between being informed by evidence and waiting for evidence to make the decision for you.

The latter is often impossible.

Sometimes the coach who overrode the programme was simply wrong. They misread the athlete, changed something unnecessarily or convinced themselves that experience had revealed something it hadn’t.

The same problem becomes much easier to miss when we tell stories about innovation. We love the entrepreneur who ignored conventional wisdom, the coach who rejected accepted practice or the inventor everyone thought was mad until they turned out to be right. We hear considerably less about the thousands of people who ignored conventional wisdom and discovered that conventional wisdom had a fairly good reason for existing.

So “trust your gut” isn’t particularly useful advice.

But neither is waiting for evidence that can only exist after somebody has been willing to act without it.

That creates a difficult problem for anyone responsible for deciding which ideas get pursued because eventually someone proposes something that costs money, requires effort or disrupts the way things currently work, and somebody else asks the perfectly reasonable question:

What’s the evidence this will work?

Sometimes there will be good evidence.

Sometimes there can’t be.

If the proposition is genuinely novel, demanding extensive historical evidence for it becomes logically peculiar because, in effect, you’re asking the future to provide references.

There is another layer to this, which I suspect gets disguised as rationality more often than we’d like to admit.

The organisation and the person making the decision may not experience risk in the same way.

An organisation can potentially afford a portfolio of experiments in which several produce very little and one creates disproportionate value. The person approving those experiments experiences each failure differently. Their budget gets questioned. They explain the wasted money. Their judgement becomes part of the story.

The organisation receives the upside as a system, while the individual may carry the downside personally.

Perfectly rational behaviour at the individual level can create excessive conservatism at the organisational level, without anybody consciously deciding to resist new ideas.

What looks like evidence-based decision-making can quietly become career-risk management.

That takes me back to the bees.

The colony doesn’t need every exploratory flight to succeed because that isn’t what exploration is for. The exploratory bee isn’t making a badly evidenced decision about where the entire colony should move. It is conducting a relatively cheap search that creates information the colony didn’t previously have.

Some searches will find nothing.

That doesn’t necessarily make them failures.

I wonder whether organisations struggle with innovation partly because we judge exploratory activity using the same standards we use to judge exploitation.

We ask an experiment for ROI before it has had the opportunity to teach us anything, demand forecasts from something whose purpose is partly to discover what is forecastable, then interpret the absence of reassuring data as a reason to allocate resources towards the things we already understand.

It is difficult to argue with any individual decision made this way. The existing product has data behind it. The established process has a track record. The familiar market can be modelled with considerably more confidence than the unfamiliar one.

Each decision can look entirely sensible on its own.

And over time, you become increasingly efficient at doing what already works.

I noticed…of course I noticed!

There would be something slightly ridiculous about publishing something on the internet, watching thousands of people choose to read it, and then pretending not to care when some of them decide they no longer want to.

But I’m also not particularly worried about it.

My writing has changed over the past month or so. The subjects have shifted a little. The style probably has too. I’ve been writing less about things I feel able to explain and more about things I’m still trying to understand.

Perhaps those essays aren’t what some people subscribed for. Fair enough.

I started writing these essays because writing forces me to stay with an idea longer than thinking about it does.

Something happens at work. I read something that irritates me. A conversation connects with an experience from years ago. Two ideas that seemed unrelated suddenly aren’t.

Usually, the idea hangs around for a while. I’ll find myself thinking about it while driving. Something else I’m reading will connect to it. I’ll mention it in a conversation and realise I haven’t quite worked out what I mean yet.

Eventually I start writing, not because I have something fully formed that I want to tell people, but because I want to find out what happens if I follow the thought properly.

Writing makes that difficult to avoid.

In your head, you can skip over the inconvenient bits. Contradictions are surprisingly easy to ignore when they are moving around at the speed of thought. An argument can feel completely convincing until you have to put one sentence after another and discover that sentence four doesn’t actually follow sentence three.

Writing slows the whole thing down. It makes me stay with an idea long enough to discover whether there is actually anything there.

Sometimes there isn’t. Sometimes I begin thinking I’m writing about one thing and discover halfway through that I’m writing about something else entirely.

That is still the part I value most. The published essay is really just the visible end of that process. The strange thing is that once other people start reading, it becomes very easy to forget. An essay becomes content. A subscriber becomes a metric. A subject performs well, so perhaps I should write about it again. You notice which titles get opened. Which essays get shared. Which subjects bring new subscribers. Which ones quietly send people towards the exit.

None of that is bad information, but it changes the environment in which you write.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the question can change from:

“What am I trying to understand?”

to:

“What will people want to read?”

Those questions occasionally lead to the same place, but not always. And I think that difference matters.

I don’t think there is anything noble about ignoring an audience. If people repeatedly find something uninteresting, that is information. If everyone leaves, eventually I may have to entertain the possibility that the problem is not them. There is also a convenient story available to anyone losing readers…

I’m evolving. They just don’t understand the new direction. The work has become more challenging…perhaps. Or perhaps the writing has become worse.

That possibility deserves more than a rhetorical mention. If people who previously chose to read my work are now deciding not to, something has changed. I can’t know from an unsubscribe whether that change is in the subject, the writing, their interests or mine, but dismissing it as the cost of evolution would be a very convenient way of learning nothing from it. Losing 500 subscribers isn’t evidence of artistic integrity. It’s just 500 people who decided they no longer wanted another email from me.

But information doesn’t have to become instruction.

Because if I allow the audience I built by following my curiosity to determine what I am allowed to become curious about next, I have created a rather peculiar trap. And I’m not sure this is only a problem with writing.

We spend years becoming good at something. Eventually other people notice. They begin to associate us with it. Employ us for it. Recommend us for it. Perhaps even pay us very well for it.

Being good at something isn’t particularly restrictive on its own. The interesting part happens when other people begin to value us for being good at it.

Now there is something attached to staying the same…

We know where our credibility sits. We know which problems people bring to us. We know which rooms our expertise gets us invited into. Our status, income or sense of who we are can become attached to it as well.

Nobody has to tell us not to change direction. Changing direction simply becomes more expensive. We may have to tolerate being less useful for a while. Less credible. Perhaps less successful. We may have to become a beginner again in front of people who already think of us as an expert.

So the evidence that we were doing something valuable can gradually become pressure to keep doing the same thing. The reputation we worked so hard to build can quietly become a boundary around what we feel permitted to explore next. Maybe that is why the 500 unsubscribes interested me more than they bothered me. They forced me to ask what these essays are actually for.

If the purpose is to build the largest possible newsletter, then losing 500 subscribers is fairly unambiguous feedback. Find out what changed and fix it.

But that was never really why I started.

I started because writing helps me think. It gives me somewhere to take the fragments from work, life, books, conversations, mistakes and experiences and see whether they belong together. The usefulness to other people comes afterwards.

If I reverse that relationship, I suspect the writing becomes more predictable. Possibly more popular. And considerably less useful to the person doing the writing.

So yes, I noticed the 500. And, yes, I care that they left.

I’m just not convinced they should get a vote on what I write next.

We tend to think of courage as something people have or they don’t.

Some people seem fearless. They speak up in meetings, challenge poor decisions, deliver difficult feedback and appear relatively unaffected by the consequences. We describe them as confident, assertive or courageous, as though they possess some internal quality the rest of us were issued in smaller quantities.

But we may be misreading what we are seeing.

The precursor to courage isn’t necessarily confidence. It is fear.

That sounds backwards until you realise that without fear, courage doesn’t really exist. If there is nothing at stake, nothing to lose, no possibility of rejection, embarrassment, conflict or consequence, then speaking up doesn’t require courage. It is simply speaking.

Which raises an interesting question about whether fearlessness even exists.

Ignorance can look remarkably like fearlessness when someone doesn’t understand the risk. Numbness can look like it when someone has stopped responding to it. Familiarity can reduce fear because we have encountered the situation enough times to know roughly what happens next.

But none of those things are quite courage.

Courage requires us to notice the fear and act anyway.

That distinction matters when we talk about psychological safety at work, because I think we have made the concept increasingly messy. Psychological safety is often discussed as though it is something an organisation either provides or fails to provide, an environmental condition created by leaders in which people feel comfortable speaking up.

The environment obviously matters. Leaders who punish dissent, humiliate people for mistakes or say one thing while consistently doing another teach people very quickly that silence is sensible.

But there is another complication.

You can put two people into exactly the same supportive environment and one will speak while the other remains silent. The leader might genuinely invite challenge, their words might consistently match their actions, colleagues might disagree without becoming disagreeable, and every observable signal might suggest that speaking up is safe.

Somebody can still feel unsafe.

Because they did not arrive in that room without history.

Perhaps their previous boss punished disagreement. Challenging authority may once have cost them status, opportunity or belonging. They may have learned somewhere else that keeping quiet was a perfectly rational survival strategy.

The external environment may have changed while their internal prediction of what happens next has not.

This is where our understanding of psychological safety becomes more interesting. There is an external component, certainly, but there is also something happening internally. I have always thought of part of this as a kind of intellectual confidence, the ability to trust my reasoning enough to contribute despite uncertainty. I might still be nervous, expect disagreement or know that what I am about to say will be unpopular, but I have enough confidence in my tools, evidence, experience and reasoning to say what I think needs to be said.

None of this excuses a genuinely unsafe environment. There is a dangerous version of this argument where we glorify toughness and tell people to become more resilient while an organisation repeatedly punishes honesty. If the system continually harms people for speaking up, the answer cannot be endless individual courage.

Nor does courage always require confrontation. There are environments worth challenging and others where the more useful question is why you are still trying to make them work.

Knowing the difference requires something deeper than confidence. It requires some understanding of your values, purpose and identity. What matters enough for me to tolerate discomfort? What am I unwilling to compromise? What kind of person do I want to be when this situation appears again?

None of this is particularly useful, though, if we only understand it retrospectively. The interesting question is whether our response to fear can change with practice.

Most of my own practice starts afterwards. It is less mindfulness and more post-mortem.

Something happens, I feel frustrated, threatened, fearful or unusually defensive, and later I try to understand why.

What actually happened?

What did I feel?

What was I interpreting as threatening?

Was the threat real, or was I importing an old prediction into a new environment?

What did I do because of it?

And, perhaps most importantly, what do I want to do next time?

That last question changes reflection from analysis into rehearsal.

Because courage rarely begins in the dramatic moment when somebody finally speaks. It is often being built quietly afterwards, when we examine what happened, understand our reaction and decide how we would prefer to respond when something similar happens again.

The first rehearsal might happen hours after the event. With practice, the distance can shorten. You catch yourself ten minutes later rather than that evening. Eventually, you begin to recognise the pattern while it is happening.

Fear appears, but now there is something familiar about it. You recognise what feels threatened and what the fear is predicting. You have already considered what matters to you and how you would prefer to respond when this moment arrives.

That feels less like discovering courage and more like developing procedural knowledge.

You cannot simply read your way into it. Knowing that courage means acting despite fear is declarative knowledge. It is useful, but rather limited when your heart rate rises, status suddenly feels threatened and every instinct is telling you to keep your mouth shut.

We understand this intuitively in most other areas of performance. We do not expect somebody to execute a difficult skill under pressure simply because they understand it conceptually. We expose them to versions of the demand, review what happened and gradually make the response more available when the pressure returns.

Yet courage at work is often treated as a character instruction.

Speak up. Challenge more. Be courageous.

That is a fairly thin intervention for behaviour we expect somebody to produce while experiencing social threat.

The ability to act differently has to be practised.

Perhaps that is why courageous people can look fearless from the outside. We see the performance but not the rehearsals. We see somebody calmly challenge the room without seeing the earlier moments when they stayed quiet, spoke badly, reflected afterwards, tried again and slowly learned that fear did not have to make the decision.

Fear itself might therefore deserve a different reputation.

It can tell us that belonging is at stake, that our status feels threatened, that we care about the outcome, or that we are approaching one of the boundaries between what we say we value and what we are actually prepared to defend.

It can also be wrong.

An old prediction being applied to a new situation.

The task is not to eliminate the signal, but to become better at interpreting it and more deliberate about what happens next. The goal is to become familiar enough with fear that it loses its veto.

Which is why fearlessness feels like the wrong ambition.

I am not sure difficult conversations should become entirely comfortable. If there is genuinely something at stake, some discomfort may be appropriate. What can change is our familiarity with that discomfort, and our ability to recognise it without automatically obeying it.

That, I think, is what we rehearse.

Not fearlessness, but the ability to feel fear without giving it the final decision.

His surgeon was world-renowned. This wasn’t an area where I was going to out-expert the expert. He knew more about the surgery, the repair and the tissue involved than I ever would.

The rehabilitation protocol was conservative, frustratingly conservative from my perspective, although there were obviously good reasons for that. The surgeon had just repaired this athlete’s Achilles, and his priority was making sure we didn’t compromise the healing process.

My concern was slightly different. This wasn’t an Achilles being rehabilitated so somebody could walk comfortably or go for the occasional run. It belonged to a professional athlete whose job would eventually require repeated acceleration, deceleration, jumping and exposure to forces many times bodyweight. At some point, the tendon wasn’t simply going to need to be healed. It was going to need to perform.

I asked the surgeon a question. I can’t remember the exact wording now, although I remember it being mechanical, something along the lines of rebuilding a bridge that would eventually have to carry a very heavy truck. Surely, at some point, you would want to understand the forces the truck was going to put through the bridge?

He stopped.

Initially, I got chastised a little.

The protocol didn’t suddenly get ripped up. He didn’t abandon decades of surgical expertise because the strength and conditioning coach had produced a clever metaphor. The initial stages remained conservative, but the overall timeline accelerated, which gave us more time later in the rehabilitation process to expose the athlete to the things I thought mattered before returning them to competition.

I’ve thought about that conversation a few times since, particularly while reading Matthew Syed’s Rebel Ideas and his work on cognitive diversity.

The interesting thing about that room wasn’t who was smarter. It was that we knew different things. The surgeon understood the repair at a depth I couldn’t approach, while I understood the physical environment that repair eventually had to survive in a way that wasn’t central to his expertise. We weren’t bringing different opinions to the same information. Our professional worlds had exposed us to different parts of the problem.

That distinction matters because we tend to think about intelligence as something individuals possess. Expertise, experience, judgement and creativity all belong, in some sense, to the person, and the problem starts when we assume that putting enough individually capable people together will automatically create an intelligent team.

Complex problems rarely afford anyone a complete view, because our education, profession and experience influence what we notice, what we consider important and even what we regard as evidence. Another highly capable person who has travelled essentially the same intellectual route may add considerable expertise without adding much visibility.

This is where Syed’s argument for cognitive diversity becomes useful. Different perspectives increase the amount of a problem a group can collectively see, so cognitive diversity matters because it increases coverage.

But coverage on paper isn’t the same as coverage in practice.

We assemble the multidisciplinary team. In sport, that might mean the doctor, physiotherapist, psychologist, coach, analyst and performance specialist. In business, finance, operations, HR, commercial, technology and strategy all get represented. Different expertise is sitting around the table, so we assume the problem is now being viewed from different angles, except being in the room tells us very little about whether what somebody sees can affect how the room thinks.

Psychological safety explains an important part of this. If hierarchy, interpersonal risk or organisational culture makes someone unwilling to question an assumption, admit uncertainty or challenge somebody with greater status, relevant information may never enter the conversation. Yet someone speaking is not evidence that the room learned anything. A person can raise a concern, be listened to carefully and have their contribution acknowledged, while the meeting continues towards exactly the conclusion it was always going to reach. Participation and influence are not the same thing.

I’ve found myself thinking about this as permeability: whether information from one perspective can enter another sufficiently to change how the group understands the problem.

I’m not suggesting a new psychological construct. There is already substantial research around employee voice, information elaboration, knowledge integration and the way expertise crosses professional boundaries. I find the word useful because it describes something that representation and participation alone don’t capture. The information has to be capable of affecting the collective model.

Because information never arrives naked.

It arrives attached to a person, profession, level of seniority, reputation, vocabulary and perceived area of authority, and those things influence how much weight we give it, often before we have properly considered what it says. Much of the time that is sensible. I should have given the surgeon’s judgement about the repaired tendon considerably more weight than my own. Expertise is useful precisely because none of us has the time or knowledge to independently verify everything we’re told, so professional authority gives us a reasonable shortcut for deciding whose judgement to trust.

The difficulty comes when that useful shortcut becomes a filter. The surgeon had legitimate authority over the repair, while I had legitimate expertise around physical preparation and return to performance. The interesting information lived near the boundary between them.

Organisations are full of similar boundaries. Finance knows finance, HR knows people, commercial knows customers and operations knows delivery. Those divisions exist for good reasons. Expertise requires depth, and depth inevitably creates domains, but jurisdiction over a decision can easily start to determine whose information is considered relevant to it.

Imagine a commercial team hearing the same hesitation repeatedly from customers about the way a service is being delivered. Operations legitimately owns the delivery model and may have far greater knowledge of how it works, why particular processes exist and what changing them would cost. None of that makes the commercial observation irrelevant. Sitting outside operations may be precisely why it can see something operations cannot.

The boundary tells us who has authority, but it doesn’t necessarily tell us where useful information will come from.

This creates an awkward problem for multidisciplinary teams because cognitive diversity may produce precisely the observations that cross professional jurisdictions. Someone sees something because they are looking at the problem from somewhere else, then discovers that being somewhere else is also the reason their observation carries less weight.

Source can then become a proxy for information quality. Who is saying this? Is this really their area? Do they understand the context? Those are often reasonable questions, but they can quietly substitute for a more important one: is the information relevant?

A room can therefore contain considerable cognitive diversity while remaining surprisingly impermeable. People speak, different perspectives are represented and nobody is punished for disagreeing, yet the information that enters the collective model is still filtered according to status, professional language, reputation and jurisdiction.

The room has access to more intelligence than it can use.

There’s a sharper version of this problem in teams full of very capable people. Intelligence doesn’t only help us discover when we’re wrong. It also gives us considerable resources for explaining why we’re right.

A group of clever people with similar assumptions can build increasingly sophisticated arguments around the same blind spot. Each additional piece of analysis makes the explanation more coherent, and coherence starts to feel like evidence. If contradictory information cannot penetrate that shared model, greater individual intelligence may simply make the model harder to dislodge.

Which takes me back to the surgeon. I don’t think the lesson from that conversation is that I asked a brilliant question, and I certainly don’t think it is that he was wrong. His initial protocol remained largely intact, as it probably should have.

What mattered was that neither of us possessed enough of the problem. He understood what the repaired tendon needed at that stage of healing, while I understood more about what we would eventually ask it to do. Somewhere between those perspectives was a better rehabilitation strategy, but finding it required information to cross the boundary between two legitimate areas of expertise.

My information didn’t replace his expertise, and his expertise didn’t render my information irrelevant. Neither of us needed to surrender our professional judgement for the plan to change.

That may be the more useful way to think about cognitive diversity. Not simply as a characteristic of the people we’ve managed to assemble, but as intelligence that has to be made usable.

Because the question facing most organisations probably isn’t whether they employ enough intelligent people. It is whether they have created the conditions in which the intelligence they already employ can change their mind.

How much of what this room knows is capable of changing what this room thinks?

Something about it feels wrong to several of them. Not necessarily wrong enough to oppose it, and perhaps not even clear enough to explain. Four can put some language around their concern. Two decide it is important enough to raise. One actually does.

The concern is discussed. The decision doesn’t change.

A week later, the meeting appears in an update as evidence that the team is aligned.

Nobody lied.

Nobody was necessarily afraid to speak. The meeting may have been well run, the disagreement taken seriously and the eventual decision entirely reasonable. Yet the organisation began with several people experiencing some form of uncertainty and ended with evidence of alignment.

What happened in between is usually treated as a communication problem. I think it is more complicated than that.

David Ogilvy is often credited with the observation that people don’t think what they feel, don’t say what they think, and don’t do what they say. It is a neat description of a familiar human problem, but it also implies a sequence: feel, think, say, do.

Organisations add another stage.

They see.

And then they explain what they saw.

This matters because each transition is not simply the transmission of information. It is an act of interpretation.

A vague feeling has to become a thought before somebody can explain it. A thought has to become language before somebody else can hear it. Language becomes an intention or commitment, which eventually becomes behaviour. Then somebody observes that behaviour and decides what it means.

We behave as though meaning travels through this process intact.

It doesn’t.

The pressure to make things legible

Organisations cannot operate indefinitely in ambiguity. Decisions have to be made, resources allocated, projects approved and risks managed. Senior leaders cannot absorb every conversation, hesitation and half-formed concern occurring across a company.

So information gets compressed.

Usually for perfectly sensible reasons.

Someone notices that a project doesn’t feel quite right but cannot explain why. Their manager asks them to make the concern more specific. The concern becomes an assessment.

The assessment moves upwards and somebody asks what should be done about it. It becomes a recommendation.

The recommendation enters a steering committee and needs a status.

The status enters an executive dashboard and needs a colour.

Uncertainty becomes an assessment.

The assessment becomes a recommendation.

The recommendation becomes a status.

The status becomes green…

Nobody has behaved irrationally. In fact, everybody may have improved the information according to the requirements of their role. The problem is that green can acquire a certainty the original information never contained and, six weeks later, the project turns red and everyone wants to know what changed so quickly.

Perhaps reality didn’t change quickly at all, but perhaps the reporting did.

Every boundary in an organisation is a filter, not a wire. Information is translated as it moves, and hierarchy creates an implicit assumption that uncertainty arriving from below has already been dealt with. If something reaches an executive as a recommendation, it is reasonable to assume somebody has tested the assumptions underneath it.

The person below may have made exactly the same assumption. Eventually leading to everyone finding themselves acting on certainty that nobody actually possessed.

Then the journey reverses

The more interesting problem starts when leaders try to reconstruct what happened upstream from what they can observe downstream.

People attended the training, so they must understand the change.

They followed the new process, so they must support it.

Nobody challenged the decision, so they must agree with it.

The meeting went smoothly, so the team must be aligned.

Behaviour is evidence. So are survey responses, meeting contributions and adoption rates. The mistake is not measuring them. The mistake is assuming they tell us more than they do.

We lose uncertainty moving forward, then manufacture certainty moving backwards.

A person can comply without agreeing. They can agree without understanding. They can intend to change and encounter an environment that makes the new behaviour difficult. They can feel something important without yet knowing what they think about it.

This is why psychological safety only explains part of the problem.

A psychologically safe environment may make it easier for somebody to say what they think. It cannot guarantee that they yet know what they think, that what they say will influence the decision, or that what they intend will survive contact with the system around them.

Information can be present, expressed, heard and still have almost no causal power.

The explanation doesn’t stay at the top

Imagine that leadership introduces a new way of working.

People agree to it, but adoption is inconsistent.

Leadership observes the behaviour and needs an explanation.

“The team is resistant.”

That explanation might be wrong. More importantly, it doesn’t remain an explanation.

It changes what happens next.

Managers are told to drive accountability. One starts checking adoption more closely in team meetings and asking people to explain when they have not followed the new process. An employee who had been uncertain about one part of the change raises the concern again, but this time the question lands differently. What previously sounded like useful hesitation now sounds, in the context of resistance, like another reason not to change.

The manager pushes harder.

The employee learns that continuing to raise the concern is unlikely to change the decision, so stops raising it and does what is required instead. The behaviour becomes more compliant, but the conversation becomes less candid. When problems with the new process continue, they surface later and with less context.

Leadership now sees a team that needs repeated prompting, raises fewer concerns openly and appears reluctant to engage with the change.

More resistance.

The original explanation has acquired new evidence.

This is where the problem stops being a simple failure of communication or measurement. Leadership can eventually help produce the evidence that confirms its original inference.

More data does not necessarily correct the mistake because the system producing the new data has changed. Each new observation is being generated inside an environment already shaped by the previous explanation.

The organisation is no longer merely interpreting reality.

Its interpretation has become part of the conditions producing the reality it will interpret next.

What happens to the things we don’t understand yet?

There is another problem hiding near the beginning of this process….not every vague concern is useful.

People misread situations. We carry biases, anxieties, preferences and self-interest into work. Seven people feeling uneasy about a decision does not make the decision wrong, and an organisation that treats every intuition as meaningful will struggle to make decisions at all.

The difficulty is that we often cannot distinguish useful weak information from noise at the moment it first appears.

Sometimes expertise begins with noticing that something is unusual before knowing why.

This creates an awkward category for organisations:

Something happened.

Someone noticed it.

Nobody knows what it means…yet.

Most management systems are not particularly comfortable with that category.

We ask for the issue, severity, owner, recommendation and action. Even mechanisms intended to surface concerns can demand that the person reporting something classify it before the organisation agrees to retain it.

Some safety-critical environments offer a useful contrast. Near misses and anomalies can be captured before their full significance is understood. The initial task is not necessarily to prove what something means, but to preserve the observation so it can later be compared with other observations, investigated or recognised as part of a pattern.

The distinction is subtle but important.

Capture and classification are not the same thing.

An issue log still forces premature certainty if the price of putting something on it is knowing what category it belongs to, how serious it is and who owns it. Perhaps organisations need somewhere for an observation to exist before somebody has to defend an explanation for it.

Not because every observation deserves action.

Because sometimes meaning only emerges when several apparently insignificant observations begin to cluster.

Why this persists

None of this requires bad leadership, and that may be why it is difficult to correct.

The employee doesn’t want to overstate a vague intuition.

The manager tries to make it actionable.

The director makes it concise.

The executive makes it decisive.

The board needs enough clarity to act.

At every stage, somebody behaves reasonably.

Nobody has much incentive to reopen uncertainty that appears to have been resolved one level below them. The accumulated distortion belongs to nobody, because every individual translation made sense locally. Then the organisation acts on the resulting explanation, changes the environment and begins generating new evidence. Eventually, the explanation starts to look less like an interpretation and more like a fact.

“The team is resistant.”

“The culture isn’t ready.”

“People don’t want the change.”

“We were aligned when we made the decision.”

Perhaps some of those statements are true, but the problem is knowing whether we discovered them or helped create them. Leaders often ask why nobody told them.

Perhaps the more useful question is what the organisation required the information to become before it was willing to hear it.

Definitions, frameworks, models, research summaries, podcasts, newsletters and explainers are everywhere. If I want to understand psychological safety, organisational culture, strength training, artificial intelligence or almost anything else, I can know considerably more about it by lunchtime than I did at breakfast. That is mostly a good thing, but the problem begins when access to knowledge starts to look like evidence of competence.

There is an old distinction in cognitive psychology between declarative and procedural knowledge. Declarative knowledge is knowing what, while procedural knowledge is knowing how. I can understand the principles of negotiation without ever having sat across from somebody who is prepared to walk away, explain how progressive overload works without having coached another human being, or know the accepted principles of leadership without ever having been responsible for a difficult decision when the information is incomplete and somebody is going to be unhappy whatever I choose.

The first kind of knowledge has become almost frictionless, while the second hasn’t. Procedural knowledge still requires doing something, usually repeatedly, with enough feedback, mistakes and adjustment to discover which parts of what you thought you understood survive contact with reality and which don’t.

Somewhere in that process another form of knowledge begins to develop: judgement. It is one thing to know what and another to know how, but experience gradually teaches you when. You begin to recognise when the framework applies and when it doesn’t, when something doesn’t quite fit, when you have enough information to act and when you don’t yet understand the problem well enough to give an answer.

This is why genuine expertise can sometimes sound surprisingly uncertain. The person who has seen something work ten times has probably also seen it fail twice, so they know the exceptions and have encountered the awkward cases that didn’t behave as the model predicted. Over time, they learn which variables matter, which ones sometimes matter, and which ones mostly make for good presentations. Ask someone with enough experience a difficult question and you will often hear some version of, “It depends”, not because they know less, but because they know what the answer depends on.

Yet we have built an information environment that often rewards precisely the opposite. Certainty is easier to distribute than conditionality, and a clear explanation can be compressed into a post, a carousel or a podcast clip in ways that context cannot. “Five things great leaders do” is easy to distribute, while “it depends on the team, the task, the incentives, the history, the environment and what happened last Tuesday” is less cooperative.

So context gets stripped away, leaving behind what is often perfectly accurate declarative knowledge, detached from many of the conditions that determine whether it is useful. The person consuming it can become genuinely more knowledgeable, learning the terminology, understanding the model and becoming capable of explaining the concepts convincingly. They have all the right words but none of the right scars.

This isn’t necessarily dishonesty, because most people aren’t pretending to know things they don’t. The problem is that fluency feels remarkably similar to understanding from the inside and, increasingly, it looks similar from the outside too.

That creates a problem for organisations because a fluent person can perform extremely well while conditions remain familiar. They can reproduce the framework, prepare the strategy, explain the methodology and use all the right language, right up until something happens that isn’t in the model. The market changes, the client behaves strangely, the team doesn’t respond as expected, two apparently sensible principles contradict each other, or the information is incomplete and a decision still has to be made.

This is where the distinction becomes visible, because the framework tells you what normally happens, while experience helps you notice what is happening now.

For a long time, some of the signals we used to identify expertise were reasonably expensive to produce. Being able to synthesise a complex subject, produce a sophisticated analysis or explain an idea clearly usually told us something about the work someone had done to get there. Those signals are becoming cheaper, and AI accelerates that considerably.

It can explain, structure, summarise and synthesise at a level that would have required considerable effort not very long ago. It can produce a plausible strategy, critique an argument, explain a technical concept or generate the language of almost any profession within seconds. Much of this is useful, and I use it constantly, but AI changes the relationship between the appearance of expertise and the experience traditionally required to produce it.

It can give me the vocabulary and the framework, and it can even tell me what an experienced practitioner might consider, but it cannot give me the scars. The judgement that comes from acting, getting something wrong, noticing why, changing course and carrying the consequences still has to be earned.

This may create a strange problem over the next few years, as we become surrounded by increasingly sophisticated outputs while finding it harder to determine who actually knows what they are doing. A polished strategy will tell us less about the strategist, an articulate explanation will tell us less about the speaker, and knowing the literature will tell us less about whether somebody can apply it. The traditional signals of expertise won’t disappear, but their value as evidence may decline.

I’ve noticed this most clearly when interviewing experienced people. Almost everyone at that level can explain what good practice looks like, but the more revealing question is usually much narrower: tell me about a time you did this and it didn’t work. The answer changes because people who have actually been there tend to give you the inconvenient details, what they missed, what surprised them, what they tried first, why it failed and what they would do differently now. The answer becomes less polished and more useful.

Perhaps that is the real infodemic, not too much information, but an abundance of the signals we once used to identify expertise. In a world where almost everyone can sound like they know, knowing who actually does may become one of the most important judgements we make.

It isn’t because the day disappeared into pointless meetings or work that didn’t matter. Usually the opposite. A client needed something. Someone wanted an opinion on a proposal. A meeting ran fifteen minutes over because the conversation was useful. A message came in that was easier to answer immediately than leave sitting there. Then another meeting started, somebody called afterwards, and somewhere between all of that I opened the document I had actually intended to work on that morning.

By late afternoon, I might have touched ten different problems. I’m just not sure I properly thought about any of them.

I used to see days like this mostly as a time-management problem. Perhaps I needed to protect the diary better, decline more meetings or become more disciplined about when I answered messages. There is probably some truth in all three, but I’ve become more interested in something slightly different.

The problem isn’t always that we have too much work. Sometimes it is that we rarely get to finish thinking about one thing before we have to start thinking about another.

Sophie Leroy’s research on what she calls “attention residue” helps explain why this matters. When we move from one task to another, particularly when the first task is unfinished, our attention does not necessarily move cleanly with us. Part of it remains attached to what we have just left.

Anyone who has spent time moving between meetings will recognise the feeling. You are listening to the conversation in front of you while still processing something from the previous one. Perhaps there was a decision you weren’t entirely comfortable with, a question you didn’t answer particularly well, or something somebody said that only started to seem important once the meeting had ended.

You have moved on. Your attention hasn’t, at least not completely.

That would matter in almost any kind of work, but I think it creates a particular problem for leaders because so much of senior work depends less on producing things than on judging them.

A good decision often requires you to sit with ambiguity for longer than is comfortable. You have to notice what doesn’t quite fit, hold competing explanations in your head, question the obvious interpretation and think beyond the immediate consequence. Sometimes the most useful thing you can do is resist answering until you understand the problem well enough to know whether you are even being asked the right question.

Those are difficult things to do in the gaps between meetings.

There is a strange contradiction here. As people become more senior, organisations place greater value on their judgement while simultaneously creating more opportunities to fragment the attention required to exercise it.

More people want access to them. More decisions arrive for approval. More meetings require their presence. Problems move upwards because asking somebody senior is often quicker than resolving uncertainty lower down. Eventually, a significant part of the working day becomes a series of small transitions between other people’s priorities.

The difficulty is that none of this necessarily feels dysfunctional. A day of meetings, messages, approvals and quick decisions produces a lot of visible evidence that something happened. Problems move forward, people get answers and decisions are made. There is a satisfying administrative archaeology at the end of the day showing exactly where the hours went.

Thinking leaves much less evidence. You can spend ninety minutes wrestling with a difficult problem and have very little to show for it. Perhaps you changed your mind, noticed an assumption that everyone else had accepted, or realised that the question you started with wasn’t particularly useful. Reactive work gives us constant signals of contribution. The slower work of judgement can look suspiciously like doing nothing.

Modern work has also made it extraordinarily easy for something else to claim our attention. The problem is that most of those claims are perfectly reasonable.

Reply to the message because somebody is waiting. Join the meeting because your perspective matters. Review the document because a decision needs to be made. Help somebody who is stuck because leaving them stuck for half a day seems absurd.

No single interruption needs to be particularly damaging for the cumulative effect to become expensive.

The obvious response is to protect time. Block two hours for deep work, turn notifications off, create meeting-free mornings, delegate more aggressively, perhaps use AI to summarise the material you didn’t have time to read. All of those can be useful, but they also risk treating an organisational problem as an individual one.

If every meaningful decision eventually travels upwards, the leader’s calendar isn’t the only problem. If people cannot progress without getting an immediate answer from someone senior, turning off notifications does not remove the dependency. And if a team struggles whenever its leader becomes unavailable for a few hours, a protected block of focus time may reveal more about how the organisation has been designed than about the leader’s productivity habits.

Organisations already understand this principle when allocating other scarce resources. Money requires approval, headcount is debated and travel budgets are scrutinised because putting resources in one place means they are unavailable somewhere else. Senior people themselves are often kept away from lower-value activity for exactly the same reason.

Yet access to their attention tends to accumulate with far less scrutiny. A thirty-minute meeting looks like it costs thirty minutes, a two-minute question looks like it costs two minutes, and a message appears to cost roughly as long as it takes to type the reply. Looked at individually, none seems particularly expensive, which is probably why they accumulate so easily.

What that calculation misses is the cognitive tail attached to each one. The previous problem does not necessarily disappear because the next one has arrived, and the next one does not wait politely while we finish thinking about the last.

The real cost is therefore difficult to see. It might be the connection you nearly made before your attention moved elsewhere, the assumption you would have questioned if you had stayed with the problem for another ten minutes, or the decision that was perfectly reasonable given the information available but would have looked different after another half-hour of thought.

Meetings, messages and working hours leave records behind, so we can usually reconstruct where a day went with reasonable accuracy. There is no equivalent record of what somebody might have noticed, questioned or understood if their attention had remained in one place for slightly longer.

That makes fragmentation unusually easy to tolerate because its costs mostly appear as absences.

Perhaps that changes the question. Instead of asking only where our time is going, it may be more useful to ask what has permission to interrupt our thinking, and why.

Because the most expensive part of a fragmented day may not be the hours we lose.

It may be what we almost had time to understand.

A technology, a supplement, a framework or a molecule that promises to make us faster, smarter and more productive than ever before.

Today, in business, it’s AI.

In health, it’s peptides.

At first glance they have almost nothing in common. One promises to change the way we work. The other promises to change the way we recover, age and perform. Yet the conversations around both sound remarkably similar.

“This changes everything.”

“You’ll be left behind if you don’t use it.”

“It’s a force multiplier.”

The interesting thing is that those claims may all be true. They simply leave out the most important sentence.

A force multiplier only multiplies what’s already there.

Spend five minutes on social media and you’d think peptides are responsible for every impressive physique over the age of forty. It’s an attractive story because the intervention is obvious. Years of consistent training, adequate sleep, sensible nutrition and patience aren’t. We have a habit of attributing outcomes to the most visible thing in the room, while quietly overlooking the system that made those outcomes possible in the first place.

That’s why the peptide debate often feels detached from reality. Someone sleeping five hours a night, living on ultra-processed food and never exercising is unlikely to transform their health because they added peptides. The intervention isn’t ineffective. It’s simply arriving in a system that can’t make much use of it. Put the same intervention into a body built on years of good habits and the outcome may look entirely different.

Watching the debate around AI, I’m struck by how quickly it becomes a conversation about the technology itself. Will it replace jobs? Is it overhyped? Which model is best? I find myself wondering whether we’re looking in the wrong place.

AI can only respond to the thinking that produced the question in the first place. If your brief is confused, AI produces beautifully written confusion. If your assumptions are flawed, it explores those flaws at remarkable speed. If your organisation can’t distinguish signal from noise, AI simply creates more noise, faster.

A few weeks ago I sat in a call reviewing an AI-generated strategy paper. The first discussion wasn’t about whether the argument held together. It was whether the executive summary should come first, whether one section flowed better before another and whether a few paragraphs could be tightened. For ten minutes we improved the document without ever asking whether the underlying thinking was sound.

I’ve felt that pull myself. A polished answer invites agreement long before it earns it.

None of that is AI’s fault. It’s simply doing what it was asked to do.

An organisation with capable people, clear judgement and disciplined decision-making will probably get far more from AI than one built on muddled thinking and poor decisions.

The same pattern appears elsewhere. Give great coaches better data and performance often improves. Give poor coaches the same data and they often become more confident in bad decisions.

We notice the thing that arrived last because it’s visible. We overlook the years of capability, judgement and habit because they aren’t.

Perhaps that’s why every generation eventually feels disappointed by its miracle technology. We expect it to create capability. More often, it exposes the capability that was already there.

Maybe the next few years won’t tell us as much about artificial intelligence as they will about ourselves.

Two organisations can look remarkably similar from the outside. They deliver on time. Their customers are happy. Their people seem engaged. The numbers look healthy. If you were asked to choose between them, you’d probably struggle.

Then one experienced person leaves.

Six months later, one organisation barely notices.

The other begins to unravel.

I’ve seen versions of this often enough that I no longer think it’s coincidence, but I don’t think I’ve ever really understood why.

My first instinct was to blame leadership. Or culture. Or poor succession planning. All of those probably matter.

I’m no longer convinced they’re the whole story.

I spent much of my career in high level sport, where people are obsessed with performance. We measure almost everything. Training load. Sleep. Strength. Power. Recovery. Injuries. We look for patterns because small differences accumulate over time.

One thing always bothered me.

I remember working with an outstanding medical department. Rehabilitation was meticulous. Return-to-play decisions were thoughtful. Athletes trusted the staff completely. If you judged the department by the quality of its work, it would have been difficult to find fault.

Every Monday another athlete walked through the door with a hamstring injury.

That image stayed with me far longer than I expected. Not because the medical team was doing anything wrong. They weren’t. They were exceptionally good at what they did.

What bothered me was something else.

The better they became at rehabilitation, the easier it became for everyone else to stop asking why rehabilitation was needed so often in the first place.

At the time, I assumed those were unrelated questions.

Now I’m not so sure.

Since then, I’ve started noticing the same pattern in places that have nothing to do with sport.

The customer service team that somehow recovers every poor client experience, so gracefully that nobody upstream ever hears about it.

The executive assistant who quietly prevents a leadership team from descending into chaos, rearranging, reminding and smoothing until the leadership team believes it is simply well organised.

The finance manager with twenty spreadsheets nobody else understands, who has become, without anyone consciously deciding it should be this way, the real system of record.

The operations director who knows every workaround because the documented process stopped matching reality years ago.

We admire these people.

So we should.

The more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve wondered whether they also change the way we judge organisations.

From a distance, what do we actually see?

Projects are delivered.

Customers stay.

Targets are met.

We don’t see the conversation that prevented a resignation. We don’t see the spreadsheet rebuilt by hand because the system failed again. We don’t see the phone call made after hours to repair a relationship that should never have been damaged in the first place.

We see the outcome.

We almost never see the work that made the outcome possible.

Remove the finance manager and watch how long it takes before someone asks where the real numbers actually live.

Lose the operations director and discover that the documented process was never really the process.

Replace the experienced coach and realise that what looked like a robust performance programme depended on one person noticing what everyone else missed.

Institutional knowledge is usually how we describe what happens next.

I’m not sure that’s quite right.

Institutional knowledge suggests something the organisation once possessed and has now misplaced.

What I’m describing feels closer to debt.

Capability quietly borrowed from individuals, year after year, without ever appearing on any balance sheet.

Eventually the debt falls due.

People talk about the departure as though it caused the decline.

Perhaps it merely exposed it.

I keep returning to the same question, and I don’t think I have a comfortable answer.

How would you know, right now, whether the parts of your organisation that are working are working because of what you’ve built, or because of who happens to still be there?

He would almost certainly never see the building finished.

Many of Europe’s great cathedrals took longer than a human lifetime to complete. The mason carving a column at twenty-five knew there was every chance somebody else’s grandchildren would place the roof above it. The quarry worker cutting stone understood that he would never know whether his own work became part of something that endured for centuries, or whether it disappeared beneath later changes, repairs and rebuilding.

Yet the stone was still cut with extraordinary care.

I’ve been thinking about that recently.

Not because I have any particular fascination with medieval architecture, but because more and more of the work that matters to me seems to operate on timescales that exceed my ability to judge whether I’m getting it right.

There’s an old saying, often referred to as the Quarry Worker’s Creed.

“We who cut mere stones must always be envisioning cathedrals.”

It’s usually presented as a lesson in purpose.

I’m no longer convinced that’s what it’s asking.

Over the past year we’ve been redesigning an assessment used with senior leaders and executives.

From the outside it looked like a routine product update. Better questions. Better reports. Better design.

From the inside, it rarely felt like progress.

We spent hours arguing over the wording of a single question because changing one verb subtly changed the behaviour we were trying to understand. We redesigned the scoring before rewriting the questionnaire because we wanted every score to point towards a better coaching conversation, not simply another number. Entire sections were abandoned because they solved today’s problem while quietly creating tomorrow’s.

There were days when it felt as though nothing had happened.

No report to show.

No feature to demonstrate.

No obvious sign that we’d moved forward.

Looking back, I doubt anyone who completes the assessment will ever notice those decisions. They’ll simply experience the result.

That’s the strange thing about well-designed systems.

The work disappears into what it makes possible.

I wonder if the same is true of culture.

When I think back to the organisations I’ve admired, I don’t remember many strategy presentations.

I remember the promotion that made perfect sense.

The conversation nobody wanted to have but someone did anyway.

The afternoon when commercial pressure collided with a stated value, and everyone quietly waited to see which one would give way.

None of those moments announced themselves.

Looking back, they seem to explain far more than the presentations ever did.

The same thought has followed me outside work.

Parents have conversations they won’t understand the significance of until years later, if ever.

Teachers explain an idea that disappears into the background of someone else’s thinking.

Coaches repeat fundamentals that eventually become instinct.

Even writing has started to feel like this.

For the past eighteen months I’ve published an essay almost every week. Most disappear quietly into the internet. Some resurface months later in conversations I never expected. Every now and then someone mentions a paragraph I’d completely forgotten writing.

If I’m honest, I don’t know what to do with that.

It makes me wonder how much of life is like this.

How many decisions only reveal themselves years after they’re made.

How many careful choices become so absorbed into the people or systems they shape that nobody notices they were ever choices at all.

Perhaps that’s why the image of the quarry worker has stayed with me.

Not because he was building a cathedral.

Because every morning he had to decide what kind of care today’s stone deserved without knowing whether he’d ever understand its place in the finished building.

I find that harder than I used to.

It’s one thing to work towards a goal you can measure.

It’s another to keep investing in something when the evidence always seems to arrive somewhere beyond the horizon.

The question I’ve been left with isn’t whether I can see the cathedral.

It’s whether I’d still be willing to cut the stone if I couldn’t.

I haven’t taken a real break since February 2025.

Back then, we were still in Saudi.

AlUla had that effect certain places have…t stays with you longer than you stay with it.

Around that time, I published the first piece on this Substack…and every week since, another one followed.

No gaps. No misses.

In that same stretch, we moved countries. I stepped into a new role. Then another, during a company transformation. Completed a PGDip in Organisational Psychology. Continued coaching. Continued travelling. Continued being a husband and father.

From the outside, it looks like a productive eighteen months…and it has been.

But productivity is a poor witness.

It tells you what got done. It says nothing about the cost of getting it done.

What recovery was skipped. What signals were ignored.

How often your system asked for space and got given structure instead.

Nothing failed…and that’s what makes it dangerous.

Capability held. Responsibility held. Achievement held.

What narrowed was harder to measure.

Curiosity had less room. Creativity needed permission. Aliveness became something postponed…and the ADHD patterns I’ve managed most of my life got louder.

There is a limit to how long any system can carry weight before it insists on being noticed. Consistency is celebrated until it becomes identity. And once that happens, stopping doesn’t feel like rest…it feels like loss.

Not that the habit is unhealthy….more like because it no longer feels like a choice.

We’ve become suspicious of seasons.

Fields lie fallow. Forests rest. Athletes deload…even the Sabbath was never intended as an optimisation strategy…merely an interruption.

Perhaps that’s why stopping feels uncomfortable…we fear what remains when the noise subsides.

If I stop producing, what remains?

If momentum fades, what was carrying it?

What only becomes visible when nothing is being harvested?

AlUla marked the beginning of this season. Eighteen months later, it’s ending.

Just a summer…no grand plans…family, friends, experiences…

And a better question than the one I started with.

Who am I when I no longer have to produce something every week?

I’m about to find out.

See you in August.

Most organisations are remarkably good at managing things that exist.

Revenue exists. Costs exist. Customers exist. Projects exist. Risks exist. Entire departments, dashboards and reporting structures have been built around making these things visible and assigning somebody responsibility for them.

Which raises an interesting question.

Who is responsible for what isn’t there?

Not in some philosophical sense, but in the very practical sense that many organisational failures have surprisingly little to do with things people can see. They emerge from things nobody notices. The customer whose needs are changing quietly. The assumption everyone shares without realising it. The competitor that doesn’t yet look like a competitor. The question nobody thinks to ask because nobody has thought to ask it before.

Absence presents a peculiar problem. Presence announces itself. Absence doesn’t.

That may be one reason hindsight always feels so cruel. Looking backwards, the signs often appear obvious. We comfort ourselves with the thought that somebody should have known. Usually somebody did.

Perhaps this is why expertise itself often involves developing sensitivity to absence.

Sherlock Holmes famously solved one mystery not because of what happened, but because of what failed to happen. The dog didn’t bark. Physicians frequently diagnose illness through what ought to be present but isn’t. Astronomers infer the existence of invisible matter because galaxies behave as though something missing is exerting force. In each case, the signal lies not in what can be observed directly, but in the shape left behind by something absent.

Organisations, unfortunately, tend to be less comfortable with this kind of reasoning. They are drawn towards the visible. Metrics attract attention. Problems with names attract attention. Customers who complain attract attention. It is far harder to mobilise around things that have no voice and no obvious presence.

This perhaps explains why the idea of the Devil’s Advocate has survived for so long. The role is usually imagined as an argumentative one, occupied by somebody willing to challenge the prevailing view. But perhaps that interpretation misses something important.

The aim was not opposition for its own sake. It was coverage, because groups have a tendency to converge. And convergence is not a bug. It is one of the reasons teams exist in the first place.

Shared understanding creates speed. Alignment reduces friction. Trust enables coordination. A group that agrees with itself feels efficient.

Until it doesn’t.

What begins as alignment can slowly become something else. Questions disappear. Assumptions become invisible. Silence begins to resemble agreement. People stop asking how they know something because everyone around them seems to know it too. Confidence acquires the appearance of completeness.

And perhaps that is why strong teams are not immune to blind spots. They may even be especially vulnerable to them.

Which is perhaps reason enough to keep asking what might be missing.

Or perhaps not.

This piece is about labels, stories and the strange way repeated narratives gradually acquire the feeling of truth…which means it turns out to be about many of the same things I usually write about after all.

A few years ago I came across the Rosenhan Experiment.

The details are fascinating, but one idea stayed with me long after I had forgotten most of the study itself.

Once people were given a psychiatric label, ordinary behaviour often stopped looking ordinary. Everything became interpreted through the diagnosis. The label arrived first. The evidence followed.

The more I thought about it, the less it felt like a lesson about psychiatry.

It felt like a lesson about being human.

Because labels are rarely neutral. Once we decide someone is difficult, talented, reliable, emotional, high potential, disorganised, strategic or lazy, we begin seeing them through that lens. The label becomes a shortcut. New information gets filtered through an existing story.

The unsettling part is that this doesn’t only happen to other people.

It happens to us.

Looking back, I spent much of my childhood collecting labels without realising it.

The wording varied, but the message was remarkably consistent…

“Capable of more.”

“Needs to apply himself.”

“Easily distracted.”

“Has significant potential.”

“Could achieve much higher standards with greater consistency.”

The comments were rarely cruel. Most were probably accurate. But reading them now, what strikes me is not any individual report. It is the repetition.

Year after year, the same themes appeared. Looking back, I realise the reports were rarely describing failure. If anything, they described proximity. I was usually close enough to demonstrate understanding, close enough to show capability, close enough to convince adults that more was possible. The frustration seemed to come from the gap between what I occasionally demonstrated and what I consistently delivered.

At the time, those comments felt like feedback on behaviour. Looking back, I suspect they were doing something more powerful. Repeated often enough, observations have a habit of hardening into identity.

A teacher’s comment is easy to dismiss. A single performance review is easy to forget. Even a moment of correction passes quickly. But when similar messages arrive from multiple directions over many years, they begin to accumulate. The individual incidents blur together, while the underlying narrative grows stronger. Eventually, you stop hearing a series of observations and start hearing a description of who you are.

The child who forgets things.

The student who doesn’t quite apply himself.

The employee with enormous potential.

The person who always seems to be nearly there.

What makes this process so difficult to notice is that the evidence rarely feels fabricated. I did forget things. I was distracted. I did leave tasks unfinished. The story survives because it contains elements of truth. A half-true story is harder to escape than a false one. It cannot be disproven. It can only be ignored.

The problem is not that the narrative is false. The problem is that it gradually becomes the only narrative available.

The tragedy is rarely misjudgment. It is reduction.

The moments that support it become highly visible, while the moments that challenge it receive remarkably little attention. I can still recall many of the corrections that punctuated school, university and the early stages of my career. I remember the feeling of being called back, redirected or reminded. I remember the subtle embarrassment of discovering that I had missed something which appeared obvious to everyone else.

What I struggle to recall with the same clarity are the countless occasions where things worked exactly as intended. Success has a peculiar tendency to disappear into the background. Mistakes linger. Corrections leave residue. The brain seems to archive them differently.

Over time, the resulting picture can become surprisingly distorted. Not because it is inaccurate, but because it is incomplete. The mind begins constructing a biography from moments of friction while quietly overlooking much of the evidence that points in other directions.

Years later, it was my son’s ADHD diagnosis that brought a great deal of clarity to experiences that had previously felt disconnected.

Like many parents, I began reading. Listening. Trying to understand a world that was suddenly much more relevant than it had been before.

The unexpected part was how often I found myself in the pages.

Patterns I had never connected began quietly connecting themselves. Behaviours that had felt random started to look less random. Old memories acquired new context. Experiences that had always existed as isolated incidents began forming recognisable shapes.

Yet I gradually realised that understanding carries its own risk. Labels are useful because they help us organise reality. They become dangerous when they begin replacing it…not because they’re inaccurate, but because they’re efficient. Once we have the label, we stop updating.

I found myself revisiting old memories and reinterpreting them through a new lens. Forgotten tasks, missed details and unfinished projects suddenly appeared to fit together. There was comfort in that. But there was also a subtle trap. Every explanation has a tendency to expand beyond its useful boundaries.

Before long, I noticed how easy it was to start viewing every struggle as evidence of ADHD while paying far less attention to the moments that contradicted the story. The periods of deep focus. The ability to learn quickly. The projects that were completed. The situations in which energy, curiosity and performance aligned remarkably well.

The diagnosis explained something real. It did not explain everything.

And that is where I found myself returning to Rosenhan.

Because the most powerful labels are often the ones we apply to ourselves. Once they take hold, they begin influencing what we notice, what we remember and how we interpret our experiences. The label no longer sits outside us. It becomes part of the lens through which we observe ourselves.

At the same time, another pattern became increasingly difficult to ignore.

Running alongside the corrections and reminders was a very different message.

The same school reports that described inconsistency also described potential.

The same teachers who pointed out distractions often expressed confidence that I was capable of more.

The same managers who highlighted gaps frequently spoke about future opportunities.

Looking back, I realise I was absorbing two stories at once.

One suggested that something about me needed fixing.

The other suggested that something about me was worth investing in.

For a long time I assumed those messages cancelled each other out. Now I suspect they were pulling in opposite directions simultaneously.

The corrections taught me where to look for flaws.

The expectations taught me where to look for possibility.

Both shaped behaviour.

Both influenced identity.

And both became part of the internal conversation.

I absorbed the corrections as truth. I absorbed the expectations as noise. I don’t know why that was. I just know it was.

Praise always felt speculative. Criticism felt like evidence.

That conversation followed me into adulthood.

Into performance reviews.

Into leadership roles.

Into coaching conversations.

Into moments where I found myself rewriting an email one more time, checking a proposal one more time, or preparing just a little more thoroughly than the situation required.

On the surface, it looked like conscientiousness.

Underneath, I suspect there was often something else.

A lingering memory of being corrected.

A desire to avoid missing something important.

A determination not to become the person described by the old story.

Many people with ADHD eventually develop remarkably sophisticated compensation strategies. From the outside they often look like strengths. Attention to detail. Preparation. High standards. Relentless follow-through.

Sometimes they are strengths.

Sometimes they are adaptations.

Often they are both.

The challenge is that successful adaptation can make the original narrative even harder to question. When the system works, the effort remains invisible. When something slips through, the old explanation immediately reappears.

There it is again.

Proof.

Confirmation.

Evidence that the story was right all along.

Yet the older I get, the less convinced I am that human beings are best understood through labels, even accurate ones.

They are useful.

They explain patterns.

They provide language for experiences that previously felt confusing.

But they also conceal.

Every label illuminates certain aspects of reality while pushing others into shadow.

What interests me now is how often the same pattern appears far beyond ADHD.

In organisations.

In families.

In schools.

In leadership teams.

Someone becomes “the difficult one.”

Someone else becomes “the future leader.”

One employee is known for their creativity. Another for their lack of attention to detail.

Over time, behaviour starts getting interpreted through those identities. The same action can be viewed completely differently depending on who performs it. One person’s challenge is seen as insight. Another’s is seen as resistance. One person’s mistake is an exception. Another’s is confirmation.

The label arrives first.

The evidence follows.

Perhaps that is why old school reports still feel strangely powerful decades later. Not because of the specific comments they contain, but because of the narratives they helped establish. Many of us are still responding to expectations formed years ago by teachers, parents, managers and, eventually, ourselves.

And the question that keeps me awake is not whether the label is true.

It’s how much of what I believe about myself is observation,

and how much is simply a story that became familiar through repetition.

Because once a label arrives first, it can take a very long time before we realise we have stopped looking beyond it.

I’ve been around gyms for most of my adult life, that’s around 3 decades, so long enough to watch training trends come and go, and long enough to have been guilty of most of them myself.

At various points I’ve become deeply interested in rest intervals, velocity-based training, force-velocity profiling, contrast loading, accommodating resistance, periodisation models, recovery technologies, supplements, peptides, breathing protocols, and enough other rabbit holes to keep a reasonably active ADHD brain entertained for several lifetimes.

Most of it is interesting. Some of it is useful. A small amount of it is genuinely valuable.

But every now and then I find myself looking around a gym and noticing something slightly awkward: the people making the most progress are often not the people thinking about training the most. They’re usually the people doing it.

The strange thing is that most people already know this. If I took someone who had never exercised before and told them to sleep a bit more, walk every day, lift some weights a few times a week, eat mostly sensible food, and continue doing that for the next five years, nobody would accuse me of revealing ancient secrets. Most people would nod politely, then immediately search YouTube for something more sophisticated.

Which is understandable.

The fundamentals feel almost insulting.
Sleep a bit more.
Walk every day.
Lift some weights.
Repeat for several years.

Nobody wants that to be the answer.
Sometimes there is more to it.
Most of the time there isn’t.

Humans are attracted to complexity in strange ways. It feels valuable. It feels intelligent. It feels like effort. The fundamentals, by contrast, feel like nothing is happening. You can’t show a complex periodisation model on Instagram and feel proud. You can’t post a photo of consistency. You can’t point to a spreadsheet of sleep hours and feel clever.

So people keep looking for the next thing. A new protocol. A new tool. A new metric. A new protocol to optimise the protocol. And the industry keeps delivering it, because it works. Consistency is boring. Complexity sells.

And this isn’t just a fitness problem. It’s the same failure mode in human psychology showing up in a different context. The same brain, doing the same thing.

In organisations, the pattern is identical. Nobody ever walks into a struggling organisation and says, “You know what this needs? Fewer things.” Instead, everybody starts building, knowingly or not, accumulating in ways that mirror exactly what we do in the gym.

A new framework appears, followed shortly afterwards by a new process, a steering committee, a dashboard and several workshops. Before long there are enough governance structures to run a small operation.

The interesting part is that none of these things are inherently bad. In fact, that’s precisely why organisations end up accumulating so much of them. The new report exists because somebody wanted visibility. The new governance process exists because something went wrong once. The additional approval step exists because somebody made a mistake that was expensive enough to become memorable. The workshop exists because there was a genuine capability gap. The dashboard exists because somebody wanted better information.

Viewed individually, most organisational complexity is surprisingly reasonable. Every addition makes sense when viewed on its own. The problem only appears when viewed collectively.

A bit like body fat, actually. Nobody wakes up one morning twenty kilograms overweight because of a single decision. It’s the accumulation that matters. One snack doesn’t matter. One missed walk doesn’t matter. One skipped session doesn’t matter. Until eventually it does.

Organisational complexity often behaves the same way. Each addition seems trivial. Then one day nobody can quite work out why simple decisions require six meetings and a steering committee.

Eventually the thing still functions. Just much more slowly.

And beneath all of this complexity sits a question that I suspect most organisations don’t enjoy asking: are we actually struggling with a knowledge problem, or are we struggling with an execution problem? A knowledge problem means we genuinely don’t know what to do. An execution problem means we already know…we just aren’t doing it consistently.

That is a much less comfortable conversation, partly because execution lacks glamour. Nobody gets excited about consistency. Nobody writes books called The Seven Habits of Repeatedly Following Through on What You Said You Would Do. Nobody attends conferences on the revolutionary power of having the difficult conversation you should have had three months ago. Yet that is often where performance lives. Not in discovering the next answer, but in applying the current one.

Again. And again. And again.

The fitness industry has spent decades finding increasingly sophisticated ways to package consistency. I sometimes wonder if organisations do exactly the same thing. Not because the fundamentals are wrong. But because the fundamentals are boring.

And boring rarely feels like progress. Even when it is.

Almost everybody has had this experience…

You leave a meeting and something feels off.

Nothing dramatic happened. Nobody stormed out. No catastrophic decision was made. The slides looked professional, the discussion seemed productive, and the meeting ended on time.

From a management perspective, it was practically a triumph.

Yet as people walk out, somebody says:

“That felt a bit strange.”

And everybody immediately knows what they mean.

Nobody asks for evidence. Nobody requests supporting documentation.

The observation lands because everyone felt it., but the strange thing is that nobody can quite explain it…at least not yet.

I’ve become increasingly interested in this phenomenon.

Not because it only happens in organisations. It doesn’t.

It happens in sport. It happens in medicine. It happens in families.

It happens almost everywhere humans gather.

People often notice things long before they can explain them.

A coach watches an athlete and senses something has changed. A clinician becomes uneasy despite normal test results. A parent knows something is bothering their child before a single word is spoken. A leader walks into a room and feels a shift in atmosphere.

The observation arrives before the explanation.

Which is awkward, because we tend to prefer explanations.

That preference is understandable. Explanations feel rational. They feel defensible. They fit neatly into reports, presentations, governance structures, and decision logs.

Observations are messier…especially when they arrive carrying uncertainty.

Yet reality has an annoying habit of arriving in exactly that form.

This may explain one of the stranger contradictions in organisational life.

Most failures look obvious afterwards…painfully obvious.

After the strategy fails, everyone can explain why. After the leader leaves, everyone can explain why. After the culture deteriorates, everyone can explain why.

The confidence is remarkable.

If an archaeologist examined the post-mortem reports of modern organisations, they might reasonably conclude that human beings possess supernatural predictive abilities.

Apparently everybody knew, but nobody acted…but everybody knew.

Humans are exceptionally good at post-rationalising. In hindsight, causes become clearer, signals become stronger, stories become tidier, and reality becomes easier to explain.

The danger is that explanation creates the illusion that perception existed all along.

It didn’t.

Or at least not in the form we imagine.

What often existed was something much messier.

A concern. A hesitation. A conversation over coffee. A nagging sense that something wasn’t quite right.

I’ve seen versions of this play out repeatedly.

Someone raises a concern. Not a dramatic concern. Just an observation.

A project feels more fragile than the status report suggests. A team feels less engaged than the survey indicates. A strategy sounds increasingly convincing and increasingly detached from reality.

The observation lands politely and then disappears…not because people disagree, just because nobody can quite prove it.

Six months later the same observation returns, now supported by declining results, missed targets, resignations, or customer complaints.

Suddenly everybody agrees!

The strange thing is that it wasn’t necessarily more accurate. It was simply easier to defend.

One of the stranger features of modern organisations is that they often demand certainty from problems before they are willing to pay attention to them.

Can we prove it?

Can we quantify it?

Can we establish causality?

Can we justify escalating it?

All reasonable questions.

The difficulty is that reality rarely provides certainty in advance. The first signs of change usually arrive incomplete…as discomfort, as ambiguity, as patterns that are difficult to defend and impossible to ignore.

Organisations are often designed to filter noise, and that is usually a good thing…until something genuinely important arrives disguised as noise, then the filters become part of the problem.

Perhaps healthy organisations are not distinguished by their ability to eliminate uncertainty. Perhaps they are distinguished by their ability to remain curious about it. To investigate observations before they become conclusions. To explore questions before they become problems. To treat uncertainty as information rather than inconvenience….because most important signals arrive long before they become respectable.

A concern raised early is an opinion. The same concern raised six months later is insight. The difference is rarely accuracy. It is usually timing. Reality rarely announces itself. It usually whispers first, and the challenge is not hearing it. The challenge is trusting what you heard before everyone else can hear it too.

Most organisations claim they want strategic thinking….what they actually reward is rapid administrative responsiveness….and these are not the same thing.

The modern workplace increasingly resembles a casino designed by project managers.

Lights flashing. Notifications everywhere. People sprinting between meetings carrying emotional support water bottles and unfinished thoughts.

Everyone is “across it.” - but nobody has read anything longer than four paragraphs in six weeks.

And somehow this is considered operational maturity.

A strange thing happens when execution becomes culturally sacred.

The organisation slowly loses tolerance for cognition that does not immediately convert into visible output.

Reflection starts looking suspiciously unproductive. Questions become uncomfortable because they slow momentum. Nuance starts sounding like poor alignment.

Eventually the highest-status person in the room becomes the one capable of replying to emails while simultaneously attending three meetings and quietly dissociating.

This is often called leadership.

The problem is not execution itself. Execution matters. Airlines generally benefit from pilots eventually landing the plane.

The problem is that many organisations have accidentally created environments where continuous execution becomes a substitute for thinking entirely.

Not intentionally.

Socially.

People learn quickly what gets rewarded.

Speed. Certainty. Visibility. Responsiveness. Optimism. Calendar density.

Meanwhile hesitation starts feeling risky. Deep work becomes antisocial. Dissent feels inefficient. Exploration appears…indulgent.

Eventually the organisation starts producing a very specific type of person.

Highly functional. Operationally exhausted. Strategically narrower every quarter.

You can see this happening in leadership teams everywhere.

Meetings become performative. Language becomes increasingly confident. Nobody says “I don’t know.”

PowerPoints become emotionally smoother. Complexity gets translated into traffic-light colours for senior management.

Every problem acquires a deadline regardless of whether the problem understands time. The organisation begins aggressively simplifying reality in order to maintain movement.

This works surprisingly well…for a while. And that is partly what makes it dangerous.

Many executives now exist inside uninterrupted cognitive fragmentation.

Slack. WhatsApp. Email. Teams. Board papers. Quarterly targets. Escalations. “Quick calls.” “Quick follow-ups.” “Quick thoughts.”

There are now entire corporate ecosystems where nobody has had an uninterrupted hour to think.

Then leaders wonder why originality drops.

Why strategy feels recycled.

Why adaptation slows.

Why everyone sounds the same.

Why decisions become politically safer.

Why innovation decks start resembling AI-generated hostage videos.

The human nervous system was not built for permanent attentional shrapnel.

Neither was judgment.

One of the stranger features of modern work is how busyness became a prestige signal.

People now openly brag about sleep deprivation, impossible calendars, message volume, back-to-back meetings, and being “slammed.”

Imagine an airline pilot proudly announcing:

“I haven’t properly rested or reflected in months but thankfully I’m making decisions much faster now.”

Nobody would board the aircraft.

In corporate environments this often gets promoted.

The deeper problem is that execution consumes optionality.

Every rushed decision closes alternative pathways before they can fully emerge.

Every overloaded system becomes more dependent on familiar patterns because familiarity is metabolically cheaper.

This is why stressed organisations become repetitive.

Not because people stop caring.

Because the system no longer has enough cognitive surplus to explore properly.

Eventually curiosity itself starts feeling operationally irresponsible.

This is where many organisations quietly drift into strategic blindness.

Not a movie-scene dramatic collapse…something slower…more civilised.

The organisation simply becomes less capable of updating itself.

People continue speaking confidently. Targets continue getting tracked. Town halls continue happening. The strategy offsite still has artisanal pastries.

Meanwhile reality starts moving faster than the institution’s ability to rethink its assumptions.

And because execution-heavy environments generate enormous amounts of visible activity, leaders often mistake motion for adaptation.

This becomes especially dangerous during uncertainty.

Under pressure, many organisations increase the exact conditions that reduce adaptive thinking.

More reporting. More alignment sessions. More operational oversight. More urgency theatre. More performative responsiveness.

The organisational equivalent of shaking the vending machine harder because the snack got stuck.

Then they act surprised when innovation narrows.

When risk detection weakens.

When dissent disappears.

When political behaviour rises.

When people stop telling the truth early.

At this stage the organisation still looks healthy on paper.

Glaciers usually do.

The interesting thing is that genuinely elite environments rarely operate this way.

Aviation does not solve complexity by adding seven more status meetings.

Formula 1 teams do not improve strategy by ensuring nobody has uninterrupted thought for three consecutive months.

Special operations units do not treat cognitive exhaustion as a leadership competency.

Serious performance environments understand something corporate culture increasingly forgets:

Cognitive quality is operational infrastructure, not a luxury.

Which means they actively protect it.

They build pause into systems outsiders mistakenly interpret as pure speed.

Review loops. Challenge functions. Decision audits. Protected thinking time.

Pre-mortems. After-action reflection. Structured dissent.

Why?

Because they understand that accelerated stupidity compounds faster than almost anything else.

Corporate environments often copy the aesthetic of high performance while ignoring the cognitive architecture underneath it.

So they recreate urgency, pressure, speed, and intensity without recreating reflection, recovery, challenge, or adaptive space.

The result is an organisation permanently in motion but increasingly incapable of reconsidering itself.

“Corporate environments often copy the aesthetic of high performance while ignoring the cognitive architecture underneath it.”

Eventually the organisation becomes highly efficient at producing exhausted people who can no longer think beyond the system they are trapped inside.

At that point leadership teams are no longer steering the organisation.

They are managing the emotional comfort of continued motion.

The meetings continue. The dashboards continue. The quarterly language continues.

Everyone remains extremely busy.

Meanwhile the organisation slowly loses the ability to distinguish movement from progress.

And because the system still feels operationally intense, almost nobody notices the thinking disappeared years earlier.