Inbound & Agile

Tag: Organizational Learning

  • When the Framework Becomes the Problem

    When the Framework Becomes the Problem

    Geoffrey Moore built one of business’s most durable ideas by noticing what a familiar chart left out.

    The Technology Adoption Life Cycle drew its categories from Everett Rogers’s research on the diffusion of innovations. Innovators tried a new technology first. Early adopters followed them, then the early majority, late majority, and laggards. High-tech marketers turned those categories into a smooth market-development story: win over one group, use it as a reference for the next, and keep moving from left to right.

    Moore says that story was abstracted largely from flagship successes. He and other Silicon Valley operators had also lived through ventures that disappeared or left their shares worthless. Those failures did not look like a smooth market-development story. When Moore recast the curve, he drew gaps between the groups and made one much larger than the others.

    That gap became the chasm.

    Two Technology Adoption Life Cycle bell curves compare a familiar continuous model with Geoffrey Moore's revision: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards are separated by gaps, with a wide chasm between early adopters and the early majority.
    The familiar curve implies a smooth handoff. Moore’s redraw makes the discontinuities visible, especially the chasm between early adopters and the early majority. Original visualization by Inbound & Agile, based on Geoffrey A. Moore’s Crossing the Chasm.
    Cover of Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey A. Moore.
    Crossing the Chasm.

    The familiar framework in Crossing the Chasm did not begin with Moore defending a model. It began with him deciding that an accepted model had become too elegant to describe what companies were actually experiencing.

    After my conversation with Geoffrey Moore for The Unfolding Thought Podcast, I kept returning to the same thing: he built the chasm by distrusting a framework that looked more orderly than the world it was supposed to explain. We talked about chasms, tornados, and staircases. But the larger question is what happens when people stop treating those images as aids to thought and begin treating them as reality.

    The chasm exists as an idea because Geoffrey Moore was willing to break a framework that no longer fit the evidence.

    Moore calls these root metaphors, borrowing and broadening an idea from Stephen C. Pepper’s World Hypotheses. Pepper used root metaphors to describe the organizing images beneath entire systems of thought. Moore applies the idea more practically to frameworks such as the chasm, the tornado, and the staircase. The point is not literary. A metaphor gives people a shared picture of a complicated situation, directs attention, and helps them act before they have an ironclad case. It makes some relationships obvious, some actions sensible, and other possibilities harder to see.

    This is the old distinction between the map and the territory. The map is useful precisely because it leaves most of the territory out. It gives us something small enough to carry, share, and use. But the thing that makes it useful is also what makes it dangerous. If we forget what was left out, we start treating lines someone drew on a map as if they were features of the landscape itself.

    Comparison of a simplified map with a straight route and topographical terrain with a winding route, illustrating that a model can guide without containing reality.
    A framework relates to reality the way a map relates to territory. Its usefulness depends on simplifying. Its danger begins when we forget what it left out. Original visualization by Inbound & Agile.

    Not every framework puts its metaphor in the title, but every framework simplifies. I am using framework broadly here. A metaphor, a model, and a dominant logic are not the same thing. What they share is that each selects which relationships matter, which facts deserve attention, and which actions seem reasonable.

    Eventually, people stop saying, “This situation resembles a chasm.” They say, “We are in the chasm.” The comparison has become geography.

    That is when a framework can become the problem, especially after its assumptions have been built into the budgets, metrics, roles, and routines through which the organization operates.

    We cannot lead without simplifying

    Management frameworks are reductive. That is their purpose.

    No leader can absorb every relevant fact, understand every relationship, anticipate every response, and calculate every possible result before making a decision. Herbert Simon’s work on bounded rationality begins with this constraint. Karl Weick, Kathleen Sutcliffe, and David Obstfeld describe sensemaking as turning unclear circumstances into a situation we can understand in words and use as a springboard into action. We simplify because we have to. A good framework makes the simplification usable.

    In an author’s note in Crossing the Chasm, Moore writes that experienced technology executives often told him the book had not really taught them anything they did not already know. It had gathered their “scattered intuitions and rueful learnings” into a coherent framework. They passed the book to colleagues partly to spread the vocabulary. Some companies made it required reading simply so everyone could discuss the market from a shared starting point.

    That is an enormous organizational advantage. Before the framework, six people may be carrying six partial understandings that take an hour to explain and still do not quite connect. After the framework, one person can say “the chasm,” and the group can retrieve an entire pattern of customers, risks, and strategic choices. The word compresses experience.

    Moore called this “metaphor-market fit” in our conversation. The metaphor feels intuitive enough that people can use it without stopping to reconstruct the argument every time.

    This becomes especially valuable when a company faces something new. In Crossing the Chasm, Moore describes the choice of a first mainstream market as a “high-risk, low-data” decision. The company must make a consequential commitment with little useful hard information and no direct experience from which to predict what will happen.

    Waiting for certainty can paralyze a company. Pretending certainty exists gives it false confidence. A framework gives people a provisional way to act, investigate their assumptions, and revise the description as reality supplies information.

    AI is forcing leaders to choose a metaphor

    The evidence is incomplete, the capabilities are changing, and businesses still have to make decisions. So leaders reach for a comparison.

    Calling AI a tool leads toward training people to use it. Calling it a coworker leads toward questions about roles, supervision, and responsibility. Calling it an employee leads quickly toward headcount and replacement. Calling it infrastructure suggests that the company itself needs to be redesigned around it.

    Four ways of describing AI, as a tool, coworker, employee, or infrastructure, lead to different organizational responses and show that metaphors shape leadership decisions.
    Calling AI a tool, coworker, employee, or infrastructure makes different decisions feel reasonable. Original visualization by Inbound & Agile.

    All four comparisons can be useful. The problem begins when a company chooses one, builds the budget and operating plan around it, and then treats evidence that does not fit as resistance or confusion rather than a reason to revisit the original description.

    We need the map. We also need to remember that we drew it.

    The description has already started prescribing

    Moore told me that strategy first describes a situation and then prescribes what to do. If the description is wrong, a coherent and competently executed strategy can make the wrong prescription look rational.

    I think this happens more often than leaders admit. Teams can spend hours debating tactics without noticing that the metaphor supplied a questionable account of the problem before the meeting even began.

    Consider the language of Crossing the Chasm. A chasm is dangerous terrain. You have to get across it. Moore adds a D-Day metaphor, a beachhead, concentrated force, invasion, and adjacent territory. Once that description is accepted, many of the prescriptions begin to feel self-evident. Pick one narrow market. Concentrate resources. Establish a defensible position. Expand from there.

    Change the metaphor, and different actions begin to look reasonable.

    Ecosystem

    If the new market were described as an ecosystem, leaders might notice mutual dependence and adaptation.

    Garden

    If it were a garden, they might pay more attention to cultivation, timing, and conditions they cannot control.

    Conversation

    If it were a conversation, they might emphasize listening and reciprocal change.

    One metaphor is not always better than another. Each draws attention to a different part of the situation and leaves another part harder to see. The cognitive scientist Dedre Gentner’s structure-mapping theory helps explain why. An analogy transfers relationships from something familiar into something less familiar. The metaphor brings a pattern of inference with it. Once the market is a chasm, the logic of crossing comes too.

    The metaphor does not stay inside one person’s head. William Ocasio’s attention-based view of the firm argues that what decision-makers do depends on which issues and possible answers receive their attention. The company directs that attention through its rules, resources, relationships, and procedures.

    Once a framework is built into planning templates, budgets, and meeting agendas, it has become part of the organization’s attention system. It helps determine which facts are easy to see, which questions sound intelligent, and which possibilities never make it into the room.

    A framework has no agency of its own. The danger comes when people encode its assumptions in budgets, metrics, roles, and decision routines. At that point, challenging the framework also means challenging the organization built around it.

    I see this in marketing. We draw a funnel to describe one possible path toward a purchase, then build the reporting system around it. Before long, behavior the funnel cannot explain gets treated as a tracking problem, rather than evidence that customers were not actually moving through the world in the shape of our diagram. By then, questioning the framework also means questioning the system built around it.

    THE FRAMEWORK SERVES REALITY

    Contradictory evidence causes the description to change.

    REALITY SERVES THE FRAMEWORK

    Contradictory evidence is filtered, renamed, or dismissed.

    A framework becomes a problem when it starts protecting itself from the world it was built to explain.

    Every metaphor has a boundary

    Moore said something during our conversation that I think matters more than it gets credit for:

    All metaphors have an efficient frontier.

    Within some boundary, a metaphor clarifies more than it distorts. Its efficient frontier is the point at which that balance reverses. Past it, the same metaphor begins creating more confusion than insight.

    Moore is unusually direct about the limits of his best-known model. Chasm crossing is a particular transition in the adoption life cycle, not a permanent operating method. Microsoft did not follow his niche strategy, and its inherited market position made it a terrible precedent for the ordinary challenger. The book is also explicit that crossing the chasm is a B2B model.

    Digital consumer services often spread differently. Rather than forcing them into the chasm model, the book adds a separate Four Gears framework for acquisition, engagement, monetization, and enlistment. Moore marked the boundary and built another tool instead of asking a famous model to explain a market it could not.

    Organizations have good reasons to ignore those boundaries. A successful framework gives them vocabulary and confidence. People know it, leaders know how to present it, and teams know how to operate within it. The more familiar the model becomes, the harder it is to revisit when conditions change.

    When a framework is right at the wrong level

    A framework can fail in at least two ways. It can be stretched beyond the conditions it was built to explain. It can also be used to answer a question that exists at a different level.

    Cover of The Infinite Staircase by Geoffrey A. Moore.
    The Infinite Staircase.

    Moore develops the second problem through the staircase metaphor in The Infinite Staircase. Physics, chemistry, and biology occupy the lower stairs. Desire, consciousness, values, and culture emerge above them. Language, narrative, analytics, and theory appear higher still.

    The precise number of stairs is not Moore’s point. He told me he could have chosen ten or twelve rather than eleven. Higher does not mean better or more important. It means that each level depends on the levels below without being reducible to them. An explanation that works on one stair does not automatically explain another.

    Businesses make this mistake when they use language and theory to manufacture something that exists through shared experience. A company writes a values statement and assumes it has created values. It publishes a culture deck and assumes it has created a culture. It teaches a leadership framework and assumes it has created judgment.

    Language alone can name, examine, and reinforce what people experience together. Employees learn what an organization values from what leaders notice, reward, tolerate, and do when the stated values become expensive. A statement can remain perfectly coherent while the culture teaches the opposite lesson every day.

    A workshop on collaboration will not overcome a compensation system that rewards individual wins. Saying people come first will not rebuild trust after employees watch leaders treat them as expendable. Those are not communication problems. They are evidence that the framework and the lived reality do not match.

    Polaroid could build the future but could not recognize the business

    The most common story about failed innovation is that leaders could not see the new technology coming. Polaroid is a more interesting case because it could see digital imaging very clearly.

    Mary Tripsas and Giovanni Gavetti’s historical study of Polaroid’s response to digital photography drew on company archives and interviews. Polaroid invested in digital technology early. By 1989, it had leading work in image sensors and lossless compression. It had a functioning high-resolution digital camera prototype by 1992.

    Polaroid had leading-edge digital-imaging research capability. It failed to develop several of the manufacturing, product-development, marketing, and distribution capabilities needed to turn that research into the right business.

    Polaroid’s success had been built on the economics of instant photography. The company could sell cameras relatively cheaply and earn recurring revenue from film. Its leaders understood imaging through that relationship between hardware and consumables. A standalone digital camera that did not create continuing film sales looked unattractive inside the model that had made Polaroid successful.

    Comparison of the simplified and documented Polaroid stories: Polaroid saw digital early, built leading technology, and still could not recognize the business.
    The simplified story treats Polaroid as a case of blindness. The documented history shows a company that saw digital early, built leading technology, and still could not recognize the business. Original visualization by Inbound & Agile, based on Tripsas and Gavetti’s historical study of Polaroid’s response to digital photography.

    Management kept interpreting digital products through analog economics. It favored products that preserved a printing or consumables component while the company underinvested in low-cost electronics manufacturing, rapid product development, and new distribution channels. Despite having a working prototype in 1992, Polaroid did not announce its PDC-2000 megapixel camera until 1996, by which point more than 40 other firms were already selling digital cameras.

    That created a reinforcing loop. The old business model directed investment away from the capabilities a standalone digital business required. The absence of those capabilities then made the new business look even less viable from inside Polaroid. The framework shaped the company’s capabilities, and the missing capabilities appeared to confirm the framework.

    C.K. Prahalad and Richard Bettis called this kind of governing worldview a dominant logic. Experience in a successful core business creates mental maps for allocating resources. Over time, the company’s planning, compensation, staffing, and structure can reinforce them. Decades of success had given Polaroid’s framework evidence, believers, vocabulary, and an organization designed to make it true again.

    The most dangerous framework may be the one that once explained the business brilliantly.

    Even our cautionary stories become frameworks

    Even the Kodak story we use to warn against old frameworks has been flattened into one. Kodak did not simply invent digital photography and ignore it. Natalya Vinokurova and Rahul Kapoor’s archival study of Kodak’s attempts at strategic renewal documents decades of investment in digital imaging and other attempts at renewal. Kodak led the United States digital-camera market in 2004 and 2005.

    It still failed, but the management problem was more complicated than blindness. Kodak had to find a viable path from an extraordinarily profitable legacy business into a market with uncertain timing and worse economics.

    “Do not be Kodak” teaches leaders to look for denial. It may leave them unprepared for the harder case: a company can see the disruption, invest heavily, and still fail to find a new business capable of sustaining the enterprise. Seeing the transition did not guarantee that a business with film-like economics existed on the other side.

    The framework should create questions, not end them

    Moore described three ways of testing a framework and said we should use all three at some point in the process.

    TEST 01

    Does it correspond with the facts?

    What does the evidence actually show? Which observations support the framework? Which do not? Are we taking failed ventures as seriously as flagship successes, the way Moore did when he redrew the adoption curve?

    The question sounds obvious. It becomes difficult once the framework determines which data the organization collects and what people are willing to recognize as evidence.

    TEST 02

    Does it cohere with what else we know?

    An explanation should fit with the broader body of credible knowledge around it. A sales model that works only if we ignore how customers buy, a culture model that contradicts what incentives reward, or an AI strategy that assumes capabilities the technology does not possess has a coherence problem even before the results arrive.

    Coherence is not proof. A completely wrong worldview can be internally consistent. It is one test.

    TEST 03

    Does it work?

    The framework should improve our ability to act. Does it help people make better decisions? Does it predict anything useful? Are the results durable, or do they look good only inside the measurement system the framework created?

    The three tests still leave one question unanswered. A framework can correspond with the facts, cohere with what else we know, and produce results while serving a bad purpose. Moore kept returning to another question near the end of our conversation:

    What is it most important for you to be in service to?

    Accuracy and usefulness do not tell us whether a framework’s purpose is worth serving. A model can work for one department while moving costs onto everyone else, or produce growth while damaging customers or employees. Leaders still have to ask who benefits, who pays, and whether the framework is making consequences disappear because they fall outside the map.

    When the map stops serving us

    Those questions are useful only if an organization can tolerate their answers. A framework has to remain answerable to the world and to the purpose it is supposed to serve, even when the evidence threatens a plan, an executive’s judgment, or expertise built around the model.

    Start by stating what the framework leads us to expect and what evidence would show that expectation is wrong. Then give someone both permission and protection to bring that evidence into the room.

    The statistician George Box warned that a person “must not be like Pygmalion and fall in love with his model.”

    The discrepancy between the model and the world is where learning begins.

    That is why intellectual humility becomes an operating requirement. It cannot remain a private virtue or a vague reminder to keep an open mind. The organization needs ways to surface evidence that does not fit and revise plans before defending the framework becomes more important than understanding what is happening. Otherwise, the people with the most authority can explain away each discrepancy until reality makes the correction for them.

    That is how the chasm entered Moore’s original map. The smooth adoption curve could not explain why promising ventures kept failing between early enthusiasts and mainstream customers. Moore did not dismiss those failures as noise or somebody else’s poor execution. He treated them as evidence that the accepted model could not see something important.

    AI will keep changing faster than any one of our current metaphors. When its behavior no longer fits the category a company chose, leaders should treat that mismatch as information, not as a reason to defend the budget, organization, or strategy built around the old description.

    We need the map, and we need the metaphor. But when the world stops matching either one, our job is not to explain away what does not fit, blame somebody else’s execution, or hide consequences that fall outside the frame. Reality may not be refusing to cooperate. The framework may no longer be serving us. The discipline is to remain more committed to the world than to the idea that once helped us see it.

    Geoffrey Moore and Eric Pratum in the episode artwork for The Unfolding Thought Podcast.
    Geoffrey Moore and Eric Pratum for The Unfolding Thought Podcast.

    Sources and further reading

  • When an Institution Stops Defining Its Own Values

    When an Institution Stops Defining Its Own Values

    An institution does not have to collapse to lose itself. It can keep its name, buildings, leaders, members, and mission statement. It can even become more visible and powerful.

    The loss occurs when its people stop looking to the institution to decide what its own values require. A church can preach forgiveness while a political tribe defines who deserves it. A company can celebrate quality while its incentives teach that speed is what matters. A university can defend inquiry while status rewards only safe conclusions.

    When the stated value conflicts with the system that supplies attention, belonging, reward, and threat, the mission statement is rarely the deciding force.

    That is the leadership problem I kept returning to after my conversation with Jonathan Rauch for The Unfolding Thought Podcast. Rauch’s recent book, Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy, is explicitly about Christianity and American democracy. It is also a case study in how an institution can remain recognizable after an outside system has begun defining what its values mean.

    The institution still has formal authority. Something else now has formative authority.

    A lifelong atheist reverses course

    Rauch is not a Christian arguing that Americans should return to church. He is a gay, Jewish atheist who once expected declining religious influence to reduce dogmatism and social conflict.

    In 2003, he wrote approvingly about what he called “apatheism,” a growing indifference toward religion. He expected less religious conviction to produce less dogmatism.

    He now calls that one of the dumbest things he ever wrote.

    The need for identity, meaning, moral certainty, community, and transcendence did not disappear as institutional religion weakened. Rauch believes much of that energy migrated into politics. To understand why that migration is so consequential, we have to distinguish the levels at which religion and politics ordinarily operate.

    Politics is primarily an effort to order the world we inhabit. It concerns laws, institutions, resources, power, and choices whose consequences we can observe, debate, and experience. Religion is concerned first with questions that cannot be settled with certainty through ordinary evidence: why we are here, what ultimately matters, what makes a life good, what we owe one another, and whether reality contains purposes beyond us. Those answers have to be held, at least partly, through faith.

    In that sense, religion sits beneath politics as a foundation, while politics operates above it as an application. “Higher” does not mean more important. It means closer to visible collective action. Our answers to ultimate questions constrain which political goals feel permissible, which compromises feel moral, and which uses of power feel legitimate.

    Religion does not need laws or police power to exert that influence. If a person believes that “thou shalt not kill” expresses an ultimate moral obligation, the belief itself constrains behavior. Families, congregations, and cultures can reinforce the standard long before the state becomes involved. When enough people share such a belief, politics often translates it into law, establishing an expectation that applies even to people who do not share the faith.

    This does not mean every religious rule is good, correct, or worthy of becoming law. It means belief systems shape the boundaries within which politics operates. A legislature can govern a religious institution’s conduct. It cannot make someone believe, and it cannot vote ultimate meaning into existence.

    Religion exerts that influence through story, ritual, repetition, family, community, prohibitions, and ideals. A religious tradition embeds moral meaning beneath conscious argument. It teaches people what feels sacred, shameful, natural, and right, even when they cannot explain every step in the reasoning. That cultural and social learning, accumulated over generations, is difficult to reproduce when the formal belief system is removed.

    When religion weakens, the needs it served remain. For many people, politics begins doing two jobs: ordering common life while also supplying identity, belonging, transcendence, and moral certainty. But politics is a product of the world it is trying to govern. It can make rules, distribute resources, and allocate power. It cannot adequately answer questions about what lies beyond that world.

    Contingent political judgments then begin hardening into articles of faith. Disagreement feels like a battle over reality. Compromise becomes moral surrender. Opponents become enemies of the good rather than citizens with a different judgment.

    Rauch’s reversal is that politics does not simply become more important after religion weakens. It begins filling the role of religion without necessarily possessing the practices longstanding religious traditions developed to restrain fear, pride, vengeance, and tribal certainty. It can inherit religious intensity without inheriting humility, forgiveness, self-examination, and coexistence.

    What remains can still look religious even as politics increasingly supplies its meaning. Rauch’s framework helps explain how.

    In Cross Purposes, Rauch describes three broad forms of Christianity. “Thin” Christianity has become too indistinct to inspire or form people. “Sharp” Christianity replaces spiritual distinctiveness with fear, partisan identity, and political combat. “Thick” Christianity remains demanding and recognizable while developing enough confidence in itself to coexist with people who believe differently.

    Rauch applies that framework to several Christian traditions. He criticizes portions of mainline Christianity for becoming difficult to distinguish from secular progressivism, and portions of white evangelical Christianity for becoming difficult to distinguish from Republican politics. His point is not simply that one party corrupted a church. It is that institutions can import an outside politics from either direction and then mistake that politics for their own mission.

    Do the standards move?

    None of this means a religious institution has been captured whenever its members enter politics, support a party, or vote for a flawed candidate. Politics forces choices among imperfect options. People can make policy tradeoffs without adopting a politician’s character or allowing a party to define their faith.

    A vote is an outcome, not proof of formation. Institutional formation becomes visible when the standards used to interpret the vote begin moving with the coalition. The question is not simply whom people support. It is whether the outside system starts deciding what their own tradition means.

    Support for Donald Trump among white evangelical Protestants illustrates why the distinction matters. In a 2020 Pew Research Center survey, 80 percent said he fought for what they believed in, yet only 15 percent said “morally upstanding” described him very well and just 31 percent liked how he conducted himself apart from his positions. A 2016 study by political scientist Michele Margolis found that white evangelical Republicans who affirmed more core evangelical beliefs were less likely to prefer Trump during the Republican primary but more likely to support him once he became the nominee. Both findings are consistent with political tradeoffs. Neither, by itself, proves institutional capture.

    The more revealing evidence concerns moral standards. In 2011, 30 percent of white evangelical Protestants told the Public Religion Research Institute that an elected official who behaves immorally in private can still behave ethically in public office. In 2016, the figure reached 72 percent. But PRRI’s comparisons over time also show Republicans, white mainline Protestants, white Catholics, and Democrats shifting with political circumstances. The pattern is not unique to one faith or party. People across groups can revise standards around a favored coalition.

    Identity can move with the coalition too. A Pew panel study followed the same respondents from 2016 to 2020. Among white adults who did not initially identify as born-again or evangelical, 16 percent of those expressing a warm view of Trump adopted the evangelical label by 2020, compared with 1 percent of those with consistently cold or neutral views. That does not prove insincerity. It shows political and religious identity moving closely enough together that we should ask which was defining the other.

    That question also complicates what surveys mean by “Christian.” Identity, belief, practice, and participation are not the same. A 2021 study published in Sociological Forum found that Christian nationalism was significantly associated with support for Trump among voters who did not attend religious services, but not among churchgoing voters. The study does not establish that nonattenders are insincere or churchgoers more virtuous. It shows that Christian-nationalist ideas can exert political force even when detached from the institution and practices that might otherwise shape what the identity means.

    This is where Rauch’s distinction between Thin and Thick Christianity becomes especially useful. If we say “Christian” when we mean anyone who accepts the label, we may be combining people formed by regular worship, communal accountability, and demanding moral commitments with people for whom Christianity functions mainly as a cultural or political identity. Christianity can become thinner even while the number of people claiming the identity remains substantial.

    Taken together, these studies do not prove that politics replaced religion. They show what leaders should examine. When moral standards and group labels begin tracking an external alliance, which institution is defining which? My reading of Rauch is that this does not arise from an inherent flaw in Christianity. It arises when people who claim a faith become less bound by its central moral precepts than by political identity. For some people claiming a white evangelical identity, religion can supply the label while politics exerts more force over judgment and behavior. The identity survives after the formative discipline weakens.

    Why the outside system wins

    But why does an outside system gain formative authority in the first place?

    Because the systems competing to form us do not receive equal time or reach us with equal frequency. The institutions and media that occupy most of our time, repeat their interpretations most often, and tie those interpretations to belonging and status will exert the greatest influence. A value heard for an hour or two each week has little chance against a worldview reinforced every day.

    Some of the most important passages in Cross Purposes come from pastors who believed they had lost authority inside their own churches.

    One estimated that a church might have a congregant’s attention for two hours each week while political television had the same person for twelve. Others told Rauch that members arrived already formed by political media and then evaluated sermons, pastors, and other Christians according to that political worldview.

    By the time people arrived at church, they were not waiting for a pastor to explain how to see the world. Many arrived with a political worldview already in place and used it to judge the church.

    Experiments with partisan news support this mechanism. In one randomized experiment, regular Fox News viewers who were paid to watch CNN for a month changed what they knew and considered important on subjects CNN covered. Many of those effects receded after they returned to their normal viewing. Another field experiment found that exposure to partisan news changed consumption and immediate knowledge even when most policy positions and partisan attitudes remained stable.

    Repetition does not instantly erase every prior belief. It decides which facts and interpretations are most available, most familiar, and most likely to frame the next judgment.

    Organizations often behave as though communicating a value is the same thing as forming people around it. Write the value on a wall. Put it in onboarding. Ask the CEO to mention it at the annual meeting. Assume the culture will follow.

    Culture does not work that way.

    Research on organizational climate and culture describes culture as the assumptions and values that guide organizational life, while climate consists of the meanings people attach to their repeated experiences. People learn what matters by watching decisions, exceptions, rewards, punishments, promotions, and the behavior that produces status.

    Steven Kerr made the same point more bluntly in his classic 1975 paper, “On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B”. Organizations routinely say they want one behavior while rewarding another. People notice what actually pays off.

    A company says quality comes first but pays bonuses based only on volume. It gets volume.

    A leadership team says it wants candor but punishes the person who raises an inconvenient concern. It gets silence.

    A business says customers come first but protects a high-performing salesperson who repeatedly harms customer relationships. It teaches everyone that revenue comes first and customers come second.

    Rauch’s pastors describe the same conflict in church life: a church teaches humility, forgiveness, and love of enemies while partisan media can reward certainty, humiliation, fear, and victory. If the second system receives more attention, creates more belonging, and confers more status, repeating the stated values more loudly may have very little effect.

    This is not primarily a communication problem. It is a competition between formative systems.

    The question is not whether people know your values. It is whether following them makes sense inside the system you actually run.

    Leaders can see which system is winning by following attention, reward, threat, and the exceptions made when a stated value becomes costly.

    The goal is not to isolate people from outside influence or give leaders control over private belief. Institutions need outside ideas and criticism, and they do not deserve deference merely because they are institutions. The danger is unrecognized capture. The test is whether an institution’s actual decisions give members a coherent basis for evaluating the competing systems trying to shape them.

    When an institution wants to know which system is actually forming its members, it should look at the moments when following its stated values imposes a cost. That is where the ability to lose becomes decisive.

    Why the ability to lose matters

    Politics becomes especially dangerous when it begins doing the work of religion. In ordinary democratic politics, elections are part of an ebb and flow of shared power. One coalition governs for a time. Another loses, remains legitimate, and has a chance to persuade voters and govern later. Defeat can be consequential without becoming an answer to ultimate questions.

    Once politics is asked to supply identity, meaning, transcendence, and moral certainty, an election no longer feels like a temporary decision about who governs. It feels like a battle for the country’s soul. If one side represents salvation and the other evil, perhaps even Jesus and Satan, accepting defeat does not feel like restraint or power sharing. It feels like allowing evil to triumph.

    The structure is the same regardless of which party casts itself as the defender of good. Opponents stop being citizens who judge policies differently and become evidence of corruption. Political affiliation becomes a proxy for moral worth. Friendship across political lines gets harder because the disagreement appears to reach all the way down to what kind of person someone is.

    Values are easiest to honor when they cost nothing. The revealing moment comes when honesty threatens the sale, quality threatens the schedule, fairness threatens an ally, or restraint threatens a political victory. If the same value repeatedly disappears under pressure, the organization may not have a value. It may have a preference that survives only when the surrounding system permits it.

    If losing means annihilation, domination begins to look like self-defense.

    Political scientists use the phrase “losers’ consent” to describe the willingness of people who lose an election to continue accepting the legitimacy of the democratic system. It is not an instruction to accept a fraudulent or unfair result. Research suggests that consent is sustainable when the route back to power remains genuinely open. James Fearon’s model of self-enforcing democracy makes that logic explicit; studies have found that alternations of power can narrow the legitimacy gap between winners and losers and that people are more likely to accept outcomes when elections are free and fair. This also places obligations on winners. Research on mutual forbearance describes why democratic competitors sometimes refrain from exploiting every legal advantage when doing so would make future competition less credible. Repeated losses can reduce trust, while affective polarization can deepen the divide between winners and losers. Across these findings, the practical requirement is the same: procedures must be fair and the possibility of participating meaningfully tomorrow must remain believable.

    The same principle applies inside an organization. People can accept a rejected proposal, a missed promotion, or a strategic decision they opposed if they believe the process was fair, dissent has not destroyed their future, and the next decision has not already been rigged against them. Healthy institutions do not prevent people from losing. They preserve a path by which people can lose, remain legitimate participants, and try again.

    Rauch argues that the Christian teachings he summarizes as “do not be afraid,” respect the equal dignity of every person, and forgive rather than destroy opponents can help make political loss survivable. A reader does not need to accept the theology to see the institutional function. Groups that can tolerate uncertainty, preserve the standing of dissenters, and remain bound by their commitments when they lose are less likely to treat every decision as an existential war.

    A tradition that teaches people how to lose without abandoning conviction can keep politics from becoming a religion. When that formative work weakens, politics absorbs religious intensity and every contest begins to feel ultimate.

    Conviction without domination

    Can an institution retain strong convictions, accept limits on its power, and coexist with people who reject its beliefs?

    Rauch’s constructive counterexample comes from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its negotiations with LGBTQ advocates.

    In 2015, church representatives, Republican and Democratic legislators, Equality Utah, the ACLU of Utah, and other faith communities supported Utah Senate Bill 296. It extended employment and housing protections to LGBTQ Utahns while defining protections for religious institutions. The participants did not resolve their disagreement about marriage or sexuality. They identified protections they could enact together while continuing to disagree. The compromise was not a universal template: it omitted public-accommodations protections, and the ACLU criticized its unusually broad exemptions.

    The relationships built through that process supported later collaboration. Rauch treats the federal Respect for Marriage Act as another application of the same approach: protect same-sex marriages while preserving specified religious-liberty protections. Both the ACLU and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops argued that important protections remained incomplete, though for different reasons. Compromise did not require anyone to pretend the disagreement was unimportant.

    Rauch connects the church’s approach to its theology of moral agency. His interpretation is that protecting another person’s meaningful ability to choose can be a religious obligation even when the person makes a choice the church considers wrong. That gives compromise a foundation inside the institution’s own identity instead of treating it as reluctant surrender to secular pressure.

    Compromise is not automatically virtuous. Some proposed compromises preserve injustice, ask only the vulnerable party to concede, or weaken rights that should not depend on negotiation. The example supports something narrower and more useful:

    An institution can maintain a strong identity without trying to dominate everyone outside it.

    Confidence in an identity may make negotiation easier. A brittle institution experiences disagreement as erasure. A more secure institution can distinguish changing a law, losing a vote, or accommodating a neighbor from surrendering its reason for existing. The pattern leaders should look for is not weak identity, but strong identity capable of surviving constraint, disagreement, compromise, and loss.

    What leaders should examine

    The leadership lesson from Rauch’s case is not that organizations should become less political, more religious, or more ideologically neutral. Organizations have different purposes. A civil-rights group should advocate. A church should teach a faith. A political party should seek political power. A business should make choices about customers, employees, investment, and risk.

    Every institution should understand what is actually shaping its members’ judgment about the mission.

    Leaders can begin with five questions.

    1. Who receives enough attention to define reality?

      Your annual values presentation is competing with compensation plans, customer demands, professional networks, social media, managers, coworkers, and daily experience. Which source has enough repetition and credibility to define what people believe is really happening?


    2. What behavior produces status and reward?

      Ignore what the organization says it celebrates. Who gets promoted, protected, invited into important meetings, forgiven for mistakes, and trusted with resources? Those decisions teach the culture what success means.


    3. Which commitments disappear under pressure?

      Every institution makes exceptions. Look for the direction of the exceptions. If quality is always sacrificed to speed, candor to harmony, or fairness to a high performer’s results, the exception may be the operating value.


    4. Can someone disagree and still belong?

      Strong cultures need boundaries. They also need a way to distinguish disagreement from betrayal. When every dissenting idea becomes evidence that someone is not truly part of the group, leaders lose access to corrective information and members learn to conceal what they see.


    5. Can the institution lose without abandoning itself?

      Can a leader lose an argument and continue supporting the team? Can a business lose an account without breaking its standards? Can a movement lose a fair vote and continue using legitimate procedures to contest the next one? Commitments that survive loss are more credible than commitments that appear only in victory speeches.


    These questions do not prevent outside influence. They make the influence visible enough to evaluate.

    The mission statement can survive after the mission is gone

    It would be easy to dismiss Cross Purposes as an argument about Trump, white evangelicals, or the proper relationship between Christianity and democracy if you have not read it.

    Rauch is examining what happens when an institution no longer gives its members a strong enough account of its own purpose to resist being redefined by another system.

    The sequence matters. As the institution’s formative force weakens, another system begins defining reality for its members. Its standards start moving with that outside system. Loss begins to feel existential, domination becomes defensible, and obedience to the outside system is mistaken for fidelity to the mission.

    That can happen from the political right or left. It can happen through donors, customers, algorithms, compensation plans, professional status, or fear. It can happen without anyone consciously deciding that the mission should change.

    By the time leaders notice, the institution may still look much as it always did. The name remains. The meetings continue. The values are repeated. The organization may even be winning.

    The test is not whether members can recite the institution’s values. It is whether those values still govern when another system offers more belonging, status, power, or protection from loss.

    An institution does not lose itself only when it changes its mission statement. It can lose itself while repeating the statement more loudly than ever.

    Jonathan Rauch and Eric Pratum during their conversation on The Unfolding Thought Podcast
    Jonathan Rauch and Eric Pratum on The Unfolding Thought Podcast.

    This essay draws on my conversation with Jonathan Rauch for The Unfolding Thought Podcast and his book, Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy.

  • If Integrity Requires Heroism, the System Is Already Broken

    If Integrity Requires Heroism, the System Is Already Broken

    Robert Coram’s biographies praise people who chose principle over career. They also expose a failure that should scare all of us:

    Too many institutions need exceptional courage to hear ordinary truth.

    In 1967, Lieutenant General Victor “Brute” Krulak went to the White House with an argument President Lyndon Johnson did not want to hear.

    The United States was prosecuting the Vietnam War through search-and-destroy operations and attrition. Krulak believed the decisive contest was for the security and allegiance of the people living in South Vietnam’s villages. The Marines could and should fight large enemy formations, he argued, but destroying units and counting bodies would not by itself defeat an insurgency.

    Robert Coram reconstructs what happened next in Brute, his biography of Krulak. According to that account, Krulak told Johnson that American strategy was producing unnecessary casualties and that responsibility reached the top of the government, “including you, Mr. President.” If the president did not change course, Krulak warned, he would lose the war and the next election.

    Johnson rose, placed a hand on Krulak’s shoulder, and ushered him out without another word.

    Lieutenant General Victor “Brute” Krulak in uniform against a cream, charcoal, and brass editorial background.
    Lt. Gen. Victor H. Krulak.
    Cover of Brute by Robert Coram.
    Brute by Robert Coram.

    Coram argues that the confrontation helped cost Krulak a fourth star and the job he wanted most: Commandant of the Marine Corps. Johnson later selected another Marine. Krulak retired as a three-star in 1968.

    Krulak’s confrontation with Johnson is not a neat parable about a truth-teller and a villain. Coram does not write neat parables. His biographies preserve achievement, ambition, contradiction, collateral damage, and uncertainty in the same frame.

    A president responsible for a war needed the information Krulak carried. Admiring Krulak’s courage is not enough. Why did delivering necessary information have to resemble a career-ending act of heroism?

    The fork in the road tests more than character

    When I interviewed Coram for The Unfolding Thought Podcast, he explained what he had looked for in the military figures he chose to write about. He wanted people who reached a fork in the road, did what they believed was right, and paid a price.

    Robert Coram in a dark suit and round glasses against a cream, charcoal, and brass editorial background.
    Robert Coram.

    A moral fork tells us what a person does when duty, self-interest, loyalty, and fear point in different directions. It reveals more than a résumé, values statement, or performance review ever could. Coram found versions of that test in Krulak; in fighter pilot and military theorist John Boyd; and, at an almost unimaginable physical extreme, in Medal of Honor recipient and Vietnam prisoner of war George E. “Bud” Day.

    The fork also tells us something about the road builder, not just the traveler.

    When people must repeatedly choose between doing good work and preserving a viable career, the institution is not merely discovering their character. It is manufacturing the conflict. It is making personal courage compensate for defects in how information travels, how authority responds, and how careers are governed.

    Some moral choices will remain costly in any organization worth serving. No process can make courage unnecessary. But when routine truth-telling predictably requires career-threatening heroism, the price is no longer just evidence of the employee’s virtue. It is a leadership metric.

    A heroic culture can still be a silent culture

    Organizations often talk about candor as if it were a personality trait:

    • Good employees speak up.
    • Courageous leaders welcome bad news.
    • Weak people stay quiet.

    Decades of organizational research describe a more relational problem. New York University professor Elizabeth Morrison defines upward voice as employees voluntarily communicating suggestions, concerns, or information about problems to people higher in the hierarchy.

    Silence is not the absence of information. It is the withholding of information that may already exist somewhere lower in the system.

    That means a quiet meeting is ambiguous. Everyone may agree. Or the people who disagree may have decided that the cost of speaking is not worth paying.

    In a study of 3,149 employees and 223 managers, James Detert and Ethan Burris found that managerial openness was more consistently related to improvement-oriented voice than transformational leadership was. Employees’ sense of psychological safety helped explain the relationship. The effect of leader behavior was especially strong among high performers, the very people an organization can least afford to train into silence.

    Psychological safety does not require every leader to be gentle or every employee to feel comfortable. Amy Edmondson originally defined it as a shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. That makes it easier to ask for help, report mistakes, and challenge an assumption. It does not make every assertion correct, remove performance standards, or exempt anyone from the consequences of deliberate misconduct.

    Coram’s account of Krulak contains a small scene that makes the larger problem visible. During a visit to Vietnam, Krulak asked Marines what they thought. They gave him answers he did not expect and did not like. Afterward, he asked his son, Navy chaplain Victor Krulak, what was wrong with the battalion.

    His son suggested that people elsewhere might have been telling the general what he wanted to hear.

    Coram writes that the possibility appeared not to have occurred to Krulak, even though Krulak himself knew that subordinates often manage what senior officers see.

    Krulak’s blind spot makes his confrontation with Johnson more instructive. The same person can be unusually willing to carry unwelcome truth upward and still make it difficult for truth to travel upward to him.

    Candor is not secured by placing one brave person in the hierarchy. It has to survive every level of the hierarchy.

    “To be or to do” is both a challenge and an indictment

    John Boyd made the decision point explicit.

    Coram’s Boyd follows the fighter pilot from the cockpit to the Aerial Attack Study, energy-maneuverability theory, the F-15 and F-16 development battles, and the body of work later associated with the OODA loop. Boyd’s accomplishments depended on extraordinary concentration, technical insight, a network of allies, and an appetite for conflict that often made him nearly impossible to ignore and just as difficult to manage.

    John Boyd in flight gear against a cream, charcoal, and brass editorial background.
    Col. John Boyd.
    Cover of Boyd by Robert Coram.
    Boyd by Robert Coram.

    He divided officers into people who wanted “to be” somebody and people who wanted “to do” something.

    Coram shows Boyd applying that test to Air Force officer James Burton. Burton had refused an order to alter a chart comparing aircraft performance because the alteration would create a lie. He was removed from his Pentagon job and passed over for promotion. Boyd told him he had reached a fork: he could pursue the promotion and its trappings, or continue the work he believed was right. He could not, Boyd said, have a normal career and do the good work.

    As a moral challenge, “to be or to do” draws a clear line. As an organizational condition, it should be alarming.

    Why should a normal career and good work be incompatible?

    What information will never reach a decision-maker if the price is obvious before anyone speaks?

    How many capable employees will make the sensible choice, protect their families and futures, and leave the unaltered chart in a drawer?

    Hero stories can mislead managers. We admire the outlier who accepts the sacrifice and then quietly build systems that assume the next person will do the same. When the next person does not, we call it a character failure rather than asking what the incentives were designed to produce.

    Boyd also shows why an institution cannot simply reward combativeness. He could be brilliant, abrasive, domineering, and wrong. His crusades imposed costs on colleagues and family members who did not choose them.

    An organization that depends on finding a hero is fragile. A stronger one preserves the function Boyd and men like him serve: challenging assumptions, demanding evidence, and testing doctrine, without requiring every reformer to become him.

    Courage does not make a claim true

    Coram told me that one of his four military subjects did not fit his moral-fork rule: World War II fighter pilot Robert Lee Scott Jr.

    Brigadier General Robert Lee Scott Jr. in Air Force dress uniform against a cream, charcoal, and brass editorial background.
    Brig. Gen. Robert Lee Scott Jr.
    Cover of Double Ace by Robert Coram.
    Double Ace by Robert Coram.

    Scott was a real combat pilot and a double ace. He flew guest missions with pilots of the American Volunteer Group, the original Flying Tigers, and later commanded the regular Army Air Forces’ 23rd Fighter Group. His 1943 memoir, God Is My Co-Pilot, became a bestseller and then a film. He also told stories so fluently and so often that the border between experience, performance, and memory could become difficult to locate.

    Cover of Robert Lee Scott Jr.'s 1943 memoir God Is My Co-Pilot.
    Scott’s 1943 memoir, God Is My Co-Pilot.

    In one late version of the book’s origin story, Japanese rounds struck Scott’s aircraft from behind and drove rivets from the armor behind his seat into his back. After landing, he was supposedly operated on without anesthesia in a candlelit cave, where the title appeared to him on the cave wall. Coram found that the cave revelation was absent from the original book, that he could find no injury record, and that Scott had not received a Purple Heart. Those absences do not prove that every element was invented, but they leave the later account without the evidence that should support it.

    Scott matters here because moral courage is not a method for determining truth. Neither sincerity, confidence, sacrifice, nor opposition to authority proves a claim. Institutions need people to raise unwelcome information, and they need disciplined ways to test it.

    A useful truth-telling system has to protect both candor and evidence.

    If only safe claims can be voiced,
    evidence is filtered before examination.

    If every contrarian claim is celebrated as brave, dissent becomes theater.

    A serious truth-telling system protects the messenger long enough to evaluate the message.

    What ordinary people usually do at the fork

    The most revealing moral fork in Coram’s body of work may not belong to a pilot or general.

    In his memoir Ink, Coram recalls working in 1959 as an untrained attendant at Georgia’s state mental hospital in Milledgeville. By then, it was less a hospital in the ordinary sense than a vast custodial city. The institution averaged more than 11,800 patients in the late 1950s. It sprawled across roughly 200 buildings and 2,000 acres and, by the 1960s, was described as the largest mental hospital in the world.

    That scale did not produce more care. The New Georgia Encyclopedia records overcrowding, “conscious neglect,” and an institution often able to meet only basic daily needs rather than provide appropriate treatment. In a place that large, abuse could disappear into wards, bureaucracy, and sheer numbers.

    That helps explain the importance of Jack Nelson’s investigation for the Atlanta Constitution. His 1959 reporting documented experimental drugs given without patient or family consent, major surgery performed by a nurse without supervision, and staff and doctors drunk on duty. The series would win the 1960 Pulitzer Prize.

    Cover of Ink by Robert Coram.
    Ink by Robert Coram.

    Coram admired Nelson. He understood that this was what a newspaper could do: enter a closed institution and force powerful people to answer for what happened inside.

    Then, Coram writes, a doctor ordered him to dispose of boxes of medicine to hide them from Nelson’s reporting. Coram believed the labels, dates, and drugs might matter to the investigation. He flushed the pills down a patient toilet, carried the packaging to a dump, and said nothing when the reporter returned.

    He believed the material might be evidence. He recognized the choice. He obeyed the institution anyway.

    “I wanted to help him,” Coram writes. “But I did not.”

    I do not read that sentence as a verdict on the young man. I read it as a warning to anyone who designs work for other people.

    Most employees are not Bud Day. They should not have to be.

    They have mortgages, health insurance, reputations, visas, commissions, pensions, children, and an accurate understanding of what authority can do to them. They watch what happens to the first person who raises a problem. They notice whether the concern is investigated, whether the leader becomes curious or offended, and whether the messenger’s next assignment quietly disappears.

    The employee who remains silent may be making a moral mistake. The organization that makes silence rational is making a management mistake.

    The price rarely stops with the person who speaks

    Coram’s biographies also complicate the idea of individual sacrifice by showing who else pays.

    Bud Day endured five years, seven months, and thirteen days as a prisoner of war, including periods of prolonged torture. Dorie carried that captivity into public life, organized with other POW families, preserved information, kept their household functioning, and later lived beside the physical injuries and recurring nightmares that came home with him. Mary Boyd and her children experienced a different version of cost: absence, volatility, financial strain, and the work required to preserve the ideas for which John Boyd received public credit.

    George E. “Bud” Day in uniform against a cream, charcoal, and brass editorial background.
    Col. George E. “Bud” Day.
    Cover of American Patriot by Robert Coram.
    American Patriot by Robert Coram.

    Those family accounts do not erase Day’s courage or Boyd’s achievements. They complete the ledger.

    We recognize, celebrate, and talk about a few heroes, but the cost of their heroism is paid not only by them. It is also paid by the people around them.

    Organizations usually record the visible price: the stalled promotion, the resignation, the lost command. The cost that migrates into a home, a colleague’s workload, a customer’s risk, or a caregiver’s life often disappears from the scorecard. Calling the employee heroic can become a way of praising a sacrifice the institution has no intention of accounting for.

    Build for candor before you need courage

    Values statements are useful only if the operating system makes them credible. Here are six ways to make candor less dependent on individual courage.

    1. Give unwelcome information a route around the hierarchy

    An open-door policy still requires an employee to walk through the boss’s door.

    NASA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System was designed around a different insight. Aviation workers can voluntarily report safety incidents to an independent program that keeps identities confidential, removes identifying details, and offers limited protection from penalties for qualifying unintentional violations. Deliberate and criminal acts are not sheltered. The design does not confuse learning with impunity; it reduces the personal risk that prevents useful safety information from entering the system.

    Most organizations do not need a miniature NASA. They do need a channel whose independence, confidentiality, response time, and escalation rules are real rather than decorative.

    2. Make dissent part of the work, not a personality contest

    Do not wait for a natural contrarian to challenge the plan. Assign the function.

    Before commitment, ask one group to assume the decision has failed and construct plausible reasons why. Gary Klein’s premortem works because it gives knowledgeable skeptics permission to voice reservations before failure converts them into hindsight. Rotate the dissent role so that disagreement does not become one person’s identity or one person’s career risk.

    Require the decision owner to state what evidence would change the decision. “Convince me” is not a standard; it is an invitation to contest status. A falsifiable threshold is a standard.

    3. Make the most powerful person speak last

    If the senior leader announces a preference first, every answer that follows has been contaminated by information about what the hierarchy wants.

    Collect judgments independently before discussion when possible. Ask for disconfirming evidence, not just concerns. Replace “Does anyone disagree?” with questions that require content: What assumption is carrying the most risk? What would we expect to see if we are wrong? Who has information that does not fit the current story?

    Then wait long enough for an answer.

    4. Keep a decision record that can survive memory

    Record the decision, material assumptions, competing interpretations, predictions, unresolved concerns, owner, and review date. The purpose is not bureaucratic self-protection. It is to keep the organization from rewriting what it once believed after the outcome is known.

    Scott’s stories show how repetition can harden a satisfying account. A contemporaneous record gives later reviewers something other than confidence and status to examine.

    5. Review outcomes without defending rank

    In my conversation with former Royal Australian Air Force fighter pilot and Afterburner CEO Christian “Boo” Boucousis on The Unfolding Thought Podcast, the debrief was the central subject. Boo described an operating rhythm used after every mission, successful or not: compare the objective with the actual result, identify the cause of any gap, and choose a concrete action for the next mission. His organization applies the same discipline to business teams. The purpose is to convert experience into usable intelligence while keeping rank and ego from controlling the account.

    The simplicity is deceptive. A useful debrief has to remain a professional inquiry rather than a trial, a victory lap, or a briefing in which subordinates discover what the leader wants them to say. Preserve competing accounts. Separate facts from inference. Assign changes and return to see whether they occurred.

    6. Audit what happens to the messenger

    Nonretaliation cannot be measured by counting how many people were formally fired for speaking up. Career penalties are often quieter: a missed invitation, a lower-visibility assignment, exclusion from information, an unexplained performance downgrade, or the conclusion that advancement now lies elsewhere.

    Track whether people who raise consequential concerns remain, advance, and continue to contribute. Ask them what happened after they spoke. Review whether concerns were acknowledged, investigated, and closed. Hold leaders accountable for retaliation and for teaching teams through visible behavior that candor is futile.

    The Government Accountability Office’s recent review of federal disclosure systems reaches a similar practical conclusion: accessible confidential channels, credible protection against retaliation, consistent accountability, and visible leadership commitment all influence whether people trust a speak-up system.

    What leaders owe the truth-teller

    Coram is right to admire Krulak’s willingness to carry an unwelcome judgment to Johnson. The choice revealed the general’s sense of duty and the relative value he placed on career and country. We need people who will act that way when a consequential truth has no safe route to power.

    Admiration can stop the inquiry too early.

    The leader’s question is not only, Will someone be brave enough to tell me? It is also, What expectations have I created about what happens to people who tell me something I do not want to hear?

    A sound institution cannot remove every moral fork. It can keep routine evidence, doubt, error, and disagreement from becoming tests of personal martyrdom. It can make candor ordinary enough that exceptional courage is reserved for exceptional circumstances.

    When doing the work and keeping a viable career repeatedly point down different roads, the organization has confused a character test with a management system.

    Moral courage is a virtue. It should not be an operating system.

    The episode and sources

  • The Debrief Is Where Experience Becomes Intelligence

    The Debrief Is Where Experience Becomes Intelligence

    Something Christian “Boo” Boucousis said during our recent conversation on The Unfolding Thought Podcast has been sticking with me: fighter pilots debrief everything.

    They debrief good missions. They debrief bad missions. They debrief missions interrupted by weather or equipment problems. They do not wait for something dramatic to go wrong, and they do not assume that doing the work again means they learned from doing it the first time.

    Most businesses do.

    Think about a project that did not go as planned. Maybe it was a marketing campaign that did not produce enough qualified leads. Maybe a product launch was late. Maybe a good employee left, a client relationship deteriorated, or a strategy everyone liked never produced the expected result.

    What normally happens next?

    People explain. The audience was wrong. Sales did not follow up. The client changed the brief. Someone missed a handoff. The market shifted. We did not have enough time. The technology did something strange.

    Any one of those explanations might be true. Several might be true. But, more often than I think most leaders would like to admit, the explanation is accepted because it is plausible, not because anyone really tested it. The meeting ends, everyone goes back to work, and a few months later the organization encounters a suspiciously similar problem wearing different clothes.

    That is experience. It is not necessarily learning.

    Experience is only evidence. It becomes learning when it changes what you do next.

    Most companies repeat more than they iterate

    Businesses like to say they are iterative. Agile companies work in sprints. Marketing teams run experiments. Product teams release versions. Leaders collect metrics and talk about continuous improvement.

    But repetition and iteration are not the same thing.

    If you run the next sprint with the same assumptions, incentives, decision rights, and behaviors, you did not iterate. You just started over. If you collect customer feedback, put it in a report, and then proceed with the plan everyone already preferred, you did not close a feedback loop. You documented feedback.

    Boucousis makes a useful distinction between speed and velocity. Speed is movement. Velocity includes direction. A business can answer emails faster, create more content, ship more features, and hold more meetings while moving very quickly in the wrong direction.

    This is one reason a good debrief actually begins before the work. You need to know what you are trying to achieve well enough for reality to disagree with you.

    “Launch the campaign” is not a useful objective. That is an activity. “Create 40 qualified sales conversations from this audience without taking acquisition cost above the level we agreed upon” is an objective. It gives you a result to compare with an intention.

    The same is true of meetings, hires, technology implementations, and nearly everything else. “Install the CRM” tells you what people will do. It does not tell you what should be different when they are done. Without that difference being made explicit, the team can complete every task, celebrate the launch, and still have no reliable way to know whether the work was worth doing.

    We explain results before we understand them

    Human beings are very good defense attorneys for our own decisions.

    When a result is poor, circumstances were difficult. When a result is good, our strategy was smart. We might not say it that bluntly, but most of us can find a story that protects what we already believed about ourselves, our teams, and our choices.

    This is not because everyone is dishonest. It is because the story arrives almost immediately. We experience the result through our own expectations, identities, incentives, and incomplete view of what happened. By the time the meeting begins, each person might already have a different version of reality.

    The Plan-Brief-Execute-Debrief model Boucousis uses tries to slow that down with four questions:

    1. What was the objective?
    2. What result actually occurred?
    3. What caused the difference?
    4. What action will change before the next attempt?

    The sequence is important. Start with what you intended. Then describe what happened before explaining it. Otherwise, the explanation has a way of changing the standard by which the result is judged.

    You have probably seen this. A team misses its revenue goal, but the conversation quickly shifts to how much awareness the campaign created. A project is late, but everyone focuses on how much they learned while building it. A new system is barely used, but the implementation is called a success because it went live.

    Awareness, learning, and launching might all be valuable. They are not substitutes for the result you said you wanted before the work began.

    This is also why success needs to be debriefed. Success is much easier to accept and therefore easier to misunderstand. A good result can hide a bad process, an unrepeatable advantage, a near miss, or an assumption that happened not to hurt you this time. Research on after-event reviews found that people who examined successes and failures improved more than those who reviewed failures alone.

    If the campaign worked, you still need to know why. Otherwise, you may take the wrong lesson from it and confidently repeat the part that mattered least.

    This is not an excuse to avoid accountability

    Whenever a conversation turns toward systems, context, and root causes, someone worries that personal responsibility is about to disappear. If everything is a system problem, can anyone ever be held accountable?

    Of course they can.

    A person may have ignored evidence, violated a standard, failed to prepare, or simply not done the job. A leader may also have created incompatible incentives, withheld information, assigned responsibility without authority, or punished someone the last time they raised an uncomfortable issue. Both can be true.

    The point of a debrief is not to make responsibility disappear. It is to make responsibility more accurate.

    Most organizations use accountability too late. They invoke it after the result, when everyone is looking for the person who should own what went wrong. Real accountability starts before execution. It requires a clear objective, an owner, visible constraints, agreed evidence, and the ability to question the plan before everyone commits to it.

    It also requires people to be able to say what actually happened.

    If telling the truth about the work is dangerous, the debrief is theater.

    Boucousis describes debriefing as nameless and rankless. I like the intention, but rank does not disappear because the highest-ranking person says it has. Everyone watches what happens to the first person who contradicts the leader, admits an embarrassing mistake, or says that the favored strategy did not make sense.

    If that person is humiliated, interrupted, ignored, or quietly punished later, the organization still learns a lesson. It is just not the lesson the leader intended. People learn that protecting the story is safer than examining the result.

    Psychological safety sometimes gets described as making everyone comfortable. That is not how I think about it. It is what makes productive discomfort possible. Research on debriefing and psychological safety connects it with speaking up, sharing information, and learning from errors. Safety makes the evidence available. Accountability makes the evidence matter.

    Root cause can become too neat

    A few years ago, I wrote about how businesses tend to self-diagnose and then go straight to a specialist. Revenue is down, so the company decides it has a website problem and hires someone to build a new website. Six months later, the website is new, the underlying problem remains, and everyone is looking for the next solution.

    A debrief should help with this, but only if people resist the desire for an explanation that feels cleaner than reality.

    Organizations like a single root cause because a single cause creates a sense of control. The campaign failed because the offer was weak. The product was late because one team missed a handoff. The client left because the account lead did not communicate.

    Maybe. But complex outcomes usually emerge from several conditions interacting with one another. A weak offer might have worked with a different audience. A missed handoff might not have mattered if the project had enough slack. Poor communication might have been recoverable if months of inconsistent delivery had not already weakened the relationship.

    The goal is not to make the past look inevitable. The goal is to improve what the organization believes before it acts again.

    Sometimes that means ending the debrief with, “We do not know yet.” I would rather hear that than a confident story supported by little evidence. “We do not know whether the audience or the offer was the primary constraint, so our next test will separate them” is a useful conclusion. It turns uncertainty into a better next action.

    This is where red teaming can help. The red team is not there to complain or to make the meeting more dramatic. Its job is to ask what would make the preferred explanation false, which assumptions the next plan depends upon, and what an outsider might notice that the team has learned to ignore.

    AI will make the learning problem more obvious

    AI lowers the cost of doing things. We can produce analysis, copy, code, plans, reports, experiments, and variations much faster than before.

    That sounds like an unqualified advantage until you remember that organizations already have trouble learning from the amount of work they do now.

    When production becomes cheaper, the bottleneck shifts. Judgment, attention, and organizational memory become more valuable because the business now has more actions, results, and explanations to sort through.

    AI can help an organization remember. It can also help the organization repeat a bad explanation much faster.

    AI can compare a stated objective with the reported result. It can find contradictions across accounts, identify causes that recur across projects, retrieve a prior lesson during planning, and red-team a proposal before reality does it for you. Research systems such as Reflexion have even shown that an AI agent can use feedback, create a reflection, retain it as memory, and improve a later attempt.

    But storing a meeting transcript is not the same as creating organizational memory. A report is not intelligence simply because it contains more information. The lesson has to show up when someone is about to make a relevant decision, and it has to change what the person or system does.

    AI also cannot decide which purpose is worth pursuing, which tradeoff is acceptable, or whether a local success damaged the larger system. If the destination and values are vague, AI can help you move faster without helping you move in a better direction.

    What I would actually put in a debrief

    I do not think every project needs a long, ceremonial meeting. In many cases, 15 focused minutes would be an enormous improvement over the hour-long status meetings people are already attending.

    I would make the team answer these questions:

    1. What did we intend to change? Not what did we intend to do. What effect were we trying to create?
    2. What actually happened? Describe the result before anyone explains it.
    3. What evidence supports our explanation? Separate what we know from what we think.
    4. What else could explain the result? Give someone permission to challenge the explanation everyone prefers.
    5. What will we do differently next time? Name the action, the owner, and the condition that should trigger it.
    6. Where will this lesson live? Put it somewhere the next person will encounter it before repeating the decision.
    7. When will we find out if we learned the right lesson? The corrective action needs its own review.

    That final question matters. A corrective action is still a hypothesis. It might be reasonable and still fail. If no one checks, the organization can turn a mistaken lesson into a new standard operating procedure and call that learning.

    What changed because of the conversation?

    The advantage is not simply moving faster. It is learning faster.

    A business with a high learning rate does not need every decision to be right. It needs wrongness to become visible, discussable, memorable, and useful. It needs leaders who can tolerate evidence that complicates their own story. It needs success to be examined instead of merely celebrated.

    When the debrief is over, ask one last question: What changed because of this conversation?

    If the answer is nothing, you had a meeting. You did not debrief.

    This essay develops ideas from my conversation with Christian “Boo” Boucousis, CEO of Afterburner and a former Royal Australian Air Force fighter pilot. Watch or listen to “Why Fighter Pilots Debrief Everything” on The Unfolding Thought Podcast.

    Christian “Boo” Boucousis, former fighter pilot and CEO of Afterburner.
    Christian “Boo” Boucousis, CEO of Afterburner and former Royal Australian Air Force fighter pilot
  • When Success Makes a Soccer Club Weaker

    When Success Makes a Soccer Club Weaker

    What happens when a small youth soccer club develops a team that becomes better than the supposedly elite clubs around it?

    In an open system, the team would earn stronger competition and the club would gain status. In much of American youth soccer, there is no automatic path upward. The club’s best players are more likely to leave for organizations that already possess the right league badge. The original club can point to those departures as evidence that its coaches did good work, but the team that produced the evidence has been dismantled.

    Success can make the institution that created it weaker.

    That paradox reveals an information problem disguised as a competition problem. Parents are buying player development they cannot directly inspect, so they rely on league badges, wins, roster placement, facilities, and social proof. Then, when a smaller club produces convincing evidence of development, the system can move that evidence to organizations whose status has already been established.

    A system that cannot reliably elevate good development or expose poor development cannot tell parents which is which. Eventually, the appearance of development becomes easier to sell than development itself.

    This was the tension I kept hearing in my second interview with Rory O’Neill on The Unfolding Thought Podcast. Rory has spent years coaching and building youth soccer programs. Much of our conversation concerned closed leagues, pay-to-play, promotion and relegation, and the incentives around player movement. Underneath those issues is a harder question: how can a market reward good development if the people buying it cannot confidently recognize it?

    The person paying and the person developing are not the same

    In a simple purchase, one person may play every important role. I buy a sandwich, eat it, decide whether it was good, choose whether to return, and suffer the consequences if it makes me sick.

    Youth sports divide those roles among several people:

    • The parent pays.
    • The child receives the coaching.
    • The coach claims the expertise to evaluate development.
    • The parent usually decides whether the family stays or leaves.
    • The child bears most of the long-term consequences.

    Those forms of power can point in different directions. A child may need harder competition, less playing time, a different position, more unstructured practice, or an honest explanation that progress has stalled. None of those experiences is guaranteed to make the payer happy today.

    Calling the parent “the customer” is commercially accurate and developmentally incomplete. Calling the child “the customer” sounds principled but ignores who controls the revenue. The mistake is assuming that one word can describe a relationship in which payment, benefit, expertise, choice, and risk are divided.

    When satisfaction is visible and development is not, the system learns to sell satisfaction.

    Parents are buying something they cannot easily inspect

    Economists describe some expert services as credence services. Even after buying them, the customer may not be able to determine whether the right service was provided. Most patients cannot independently evaluate a medical diagnosis. Most car owners cannot inspect a transmission repair. Most parents cannot watch a practice and determine whether the coach made the right tradeoffs for a player’s development over several years.

    Youth development is especially difficult to judge because the result is partly counterfactual. The relevant question is not simply, “Is this player better than last year?” A growing child receiving almost any regular practice may improve. The harder question is, “How much better would this child have become in a different environment?” Families never get to observe both futures.

    When buyers cannot inspect the underlying quality, they look for signals. A winning record is a signal. A famous coach is a signal. Travel is a signal. Facilities are a signal. Being selected for an “elite” roster is a particularly powerful signal because it tells the parent that another authority has already evaluated the child.

    Signals are not useless. A strong league may provide better competition. A selective roster may contain better players. Winning may reflect good coaching. The danger comes when a signal becomes easier to produce and sell than the result it is supposed to represent.

    That distinction matters in a closed system. MLS NEXT membership is awarded through an application and evaluation process that considers philosophy, governance, coaching, player development history, affordability, geography, and other factors. Those are reasonable things to examine. But membership is still a selected certification, not a competitive rank that every club can continuously earn on the field. To a parent, the badge can therefore look like objective proof even though the route to obtaining it is more complicated.

    The short feedback loop usually wins

    A player’s development may take ten years. A club’s renewal decision arrives every season. A parent’s frustration can arrive after one lineup.

    The shorter loop produces louder information. The club sees a complaint, a departure, or an unpaid invoice immediately. It may not know for years whether a technically gifted 12-year-old learned to solve problems, whether a late-maturing player received enough patience, or whether a confident 15-year-old learned to accept responsibility.

    Organizations tend to manage what they can observe. Research on performance measurement and incentives has long warned that measurable proxies can distort behavior when they are mistaken for the harder-to-measure goal. In youth soccer, renewals, wins, league status, and roster size are easy to count. Development is not.

    This does not require bad people. A caring coach can know that a player needs a difficult truth. A well-intentioned director can know that a team should emphasize learning rather than a weekend result. But if telling the truth causes the family to leave, while reassurance protects the revenue that pays the coach, the business model has made honesty expensive.

    A coach can be serving the child and risking the customer at the same time.

    A more honest hierarchy would help, but it would not solve the whole problem

    Rory argues that promotion and relegation would make American soccer more meritocratic. A team that performs well could earn stronger competition. A club could not preserve status without repeatedly earning it through open competition simply because it already belonged to the right league.

    That would create useful information. Results would have consequences, and success could open a path that is currently controlled by membership decisions. In that sense, promotion and relegation is not just a sporting preference. It is a mechanism for testing claims.

    But a more objective team hierarchy is not the same as an objective development system. A club can win by recruiting the strongest current players rather than improving the players it has. It can favor early-maturing children, use conservative tactics, narrow positions, and reduce experimentation. A standings table can tell us which team won. It cannot tell us how much each child learned.

    The United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee’s American Development Model emphasizes age-appropriate development, access, quality coaching, fun, and attention to skill and effort. Those goals remind us that competitive results are one signal among several. Replacing a league badge with a winning record would improve one feedback loop while leaving the larger measurement problem intact.

    Success can make the club that produced it weaker

    Consider a small club that develops an unusually strong team. If that team cannot earn access to a higher level of competition, its best players may leave for clubs that already possess the desired badge. The original club can point to those departures as evidence that its coaches did good work, but the team that produced the evidence has been dismantled.

    Success has made the institution that created it weaker.

    That is more than an issue of fairness. It is a loss of information. Parents evaluating the original club no longer see the strong team. They see the remaining roster and the higher-status clubs that absorbed its players. The visible proof migrates away from the people who created it.

    There are attempts to address this. The MLS NEXT Development Grant Program can reward a qualifying elite academy when a player reaches specified professional milestones. That is meaningful progress, but eligibility is narrow and the grant goes to the immediately preceding qualifying academy. Many origin clubs and earlier coaches remain outside the mechanism.

    International soccer offers a broader idea. FIFA’s Clearing House distributes training compensation and solidarity contributions to clubs involved in a player’s development. The details are complex, and no payment system perfectly identifies causal contribution. The important principle is that development should leave some value behind for the institution that helped create it.

    If success causes your best evidence to leave, the system is not rewarding development. It is consuming it.

    Development needs a better scoreboard

    No single measure will solve this. That is the point. When the goal is complex, a responsible system uses several imperfect signals and makes their limitations visible.

    A club that claims to develop players should be able to show more than trophies and placements. It should be able to explain what it is trying to develop, how coaches assess progress, and what families should expect when the child’s needs conflict with the team’s short-term result.

    • Are individual goals documented and revisited over time?
    • Do assessments include technical, tactical, physical, and psychological development rather than one coach’s overall impression?
    • Can another qualified observer review a player’s progress?
    • Do players receive meaningful opportunities to apply what they are learning?
    • Does the club track voluntary retention, player enjoyment, affordability, injuries, and burnout alongside wins?
    • When a player advances elsewhere, does the originating club receive financial or reputational credit?
    • Are families told clearly that development does not guarantee a roster label, starting role, scholarship, or professional future?

    FIFA’s talent-identification guidance calls for a clear philosophy, defined player profiles, comprehensive scouting environments, player observation, data analysis, structured selection, and a process that can operate over the long term. A child cannot be reduced to one tryout, one coach, or one team result. Neither can the quality of the environment developing that child.

    Make the truth less expensive

    Transparency will not remove conflict. It can make conflict more honest.

    Before a season begins, clubs can separate the development promise from the status promise. They can explain how playing time is decided, what “elite” means, what evidence coaches use, and how a family can appeal or seek an independent view. They can make it easier for a child to move when another environment would be better. They can reward coaches for long-term progress and candor, not only wins and renewals.

    Parents also have a role. If we say we want development but punish every decision that makes our child uncomfortable, the club learns what we actually value. If we treat a badge as proof, we help turn the badge into the product. If we demand guarantees that no honest coach can make, reassurance will eventually displace judgment.

    The goal is not to make parents passive. It is to give them better information and clearer expectations so that dissatisfaction can reveal a real problem rather than merely the distance between a development process and an imagined outcome.

    This is not only a youth sports problem

    The same information problem appears in schools, healthcare, consulting, nonprofits, elder care, and business services. One person may pay, another may use the service, a third may evaluate quality, and the consequences may arrive after the contract ends.

    Customer satisfaction matters in all of those settings. It can tell us whether the payer received the experience they expected. It cannot, by itself, tell us whether the institution fulfilled its purpose. Leaders need to ask who pays, who benefits, who can judge quality, who decides whether the relationship continues, and who bears the cost if it fails. If the answers name different people, the most visible feedback is not necessarily the most important.

    American youth soccer does not lack people who care about children. It lacks a reliable way to keep care, truth, revenue, and development pointing in the same direction. Until development becomes more visible and more valuable to the institution producing it, status will remain easier to market than progress.

    The question is not whether American youth soccer has coaches capable of developing players. It is whether the system can recognize their work before success dismantles the proof.

    Listen and read further

    Rory O’Neill and Eric Pratum on The Unfolding Thought Podcast.
    Listen to Rory O’Neill on The Unfolding Thought Podcast.
  • When the Process Outlives the Problem It Was Built to Solve

    When the Process Outlives the Problem It Was Built to Solve

    An institution can be orderly, disciplined, and increasingly ineffective at the same time.

    That kind of failure is hard to see because it still looks like competence.

    The weekly report arrives on time. Every project clears the required stage gate. The dashboard is green. The audit finds no missing fields. Yet customers are leaving, quality is slipping, decisions take longer, and the people closest to the work have learned that raising an anomaly creates more trouble than ignoring it.

    Nothing is obviously broken because the organization has become excellent at demonstrating fidelity to its process. The difficulty is that fidelity to process and fidelity to purpose are not the same thing.

    That distinction is what I kept returning to after my conversation with Eliot Frick on The Unfolding Thought Podcast. Frick makes a much larger philosophical argument about whether modernity has entered the final stage of its life. His description of late-stage systems is immediately recognizable in organizations.

    A system begins with generative power. It solves problems that could not previously be solved. Its methods become credible because they work. Over time, however, the methods become inseparable from the system’s identity. When results deteriorate, the system rarely concludes that its operating assumptions may be exhausted. It concludes that people are no longer following them faithfully enough.

    So it adds oversight, tightens compliance, and treats deviation as the cause of decline. The process that once produced the outcome becomes the ritual through which the organization proves it still deserves to exist.

    A process is a memory of a problem

    Most recurring processes began for a reason. Someone shipped defective work, exposed the company to risk, made an expensive decision without enough evidence, or forced other people to reconstruct information that should have been recorded. A checklist, review, approval, or report was created to keep that failure from recurring.

    When the process works, the original problem becomes less visible. New employees encounter the solution without experiencing the conditions that made it necessary. They know the form must be completed but not what judgment the form was meant to improve. They know who must approve a decision but not what uncertainty that approval was supposed to reduce.

    The process is therefore a kind of organizational memory. It preserves an answer after the question has faded.

    That can be useful. We do not want every generation of employees to rediscover fire safety or financial controls from first principles. But a memory becomes dangerous when the organization cannot distinguish the enduring purpose from the historical method. Conditions change while the ritual remains. Eventually, people measure whether the process occurred because they have lost the ability to measure whether it still helped.

    Success teaches a system what to stop noticing

    Every successful institution develops an operating grammar. It creates categories, incentives, reporting systems, professional language, and approved ways of reasoning. This grammar lets large groups coordinate. It also makes the organization increasingly good at recognizing what it already knows how to see.

    James March described a related tension as the difference between exploiting old certainties and exploring new possibilities. Exploitation improves what the organization already knows how to do. Exploration searches for something better but produces uncertain returns. March’s warning was that adaptive systems often refine exploitation more quickly than exploration. That can make them effective in the short run and self-destructive over time.

    The problem is not that managers foolishly choose the old over the new. The old process comes with evidence, owners, budgets, benchmarks, and political support. The alternative begins as a question. One side can produce a forecast. The other can only promise learning.

    The imbalance compounds. The more an organization invests in a process, the more careers, systems, and explanations depend on that process remaining legitimate. Evidence that fits the current model is easy to absorb. Evidence that challenges the model arrives looking incomplete, undisciplined, or irrelevant.

    A failing institution often becomes more faithful to its process as it becomes less capable of producing its purpose.

    Threat makes the rulebook harder

    Declining results ought to create curiosity. In practice, they often create rigidity.

    Barry Staw, Lance Sandelands, and Jane Dutton’s work on threat rigidity describes two common responses to adversity: information processing narrows and control constricts. Organizations rely more heavily on familiar knowledge, reduce the number of voices involved, centralize authority, and formalize procedure.

    Those responses are understandable. A threat creates urgency, and coordination can matter more during an immediate crisis. The problem comes when a short-term crisis response becomes the operating model for a system whose assumptions are failing. The organization reduces variation at precisely the moment it most needs alternatives.

    This creates a cruel feedback loop. The system produces weaker results. Leadership tightens the system to protect performance. Tighter control suppresses dissent and experimentation. The organization receives less information about why the system is failing. Its leaders become even more convinced that inconsistent execution is the problem.

    People who question the process are then easy to cast as undisciplined. Yet they may be carrying the information the process was designed to exclude.

    Collapse stories can be another form of loyalty

    Frick makes a surprising argument about stories of collapse. We assume that someone predicting the end of a system has escaped its influence. Often the opposite is true.

    The defender says the institution must be saved. The critic says it must be destroyed. Both keep the institution at the center of the imagination. The defender uses its categories to explain what must continue. The critic uses the same categories to explain what must end. Neither has necessarily described what could make the old conflict less important.

    This pattern appears in organizations whenever two factions fight over control of a process whose usefulness neither side is examining. One department wants stricter enforcement. Another wants the process abolished. Both assume the available choices are compliance or rebellion.

    The opposite of defending a failing system is not attacking it. Both can keep the system at the center.

    A more useful question is what problem the process was built to solve and whether that problem still exists in the same form. If it does, perhaps the method needs repair. If it does not, the fight over the method may be consuming attention that belongs somewhere else.

    A new system may not win the old argument

    Thomas Kuhn’s account of scientific revolutions is helpful here. Transformative ideas do not always emerge by accumulating better answers inside the accepted model. Anomalies build until a different framework can organize them.

    A new framework may not defeat the old one by its own measures. It can change which observations matter, which problems deserve attention, and what counts as an explanation. Questions that once felt decisive can become smaller or disappear.

    Organizations routinely make this transition harder than it needs to be by requiring every experiment to justify itself with the current system’s metrics. But those metrics contain assumptions about value, time, quality, and risk. An idea that tests the assumptions cannot always prove itself using measures designed to preserve them.

    This does not mean experiments should escape accountability. It means their first obligation may be to produce information rather than scale, efficiency, or immediate financial return. Leaders need to know what the experiment is trying to learn and what evidence would cause it to stop. That is different from demanding that it look like a small version of the established business.

    Leadership is the preservation of options

    Frick uses the word “aperture” for a protected opening through which unfamiliar possibilities can develop. The metaphor matters because most new ideas do not begin with enough power to survive the full force of an established institution.

    A leader does not need to believe every unconventional proposal. Most will be incomplete, and many will fail. Leadership requires preventing the current operating system from eliminating all unfamiliar ideas before any can produce evidence.

    Amy Edmondson’s research on psychological safety helps explain one condition for such an opening. Teams learn when people believe they can take interpersonal risks. That does not mean conflict disappears. It means uncertainty, error, and disagreement can enter the conversation without immediately becoming evidence that someone does not belong.

    Authenticity matters too. Research by Charlan Nemeth, Keith Brown, and John Rogers found that a genuinely held minority position produced better quantity and quality of solutions than several forms of assigned devil’s advocacy. An organization does not receive the full benefit of dissent by appointing someone to perform disagreement inside a meeting whose real boundaries remain untouched.

    Leadership does not require knowing what comes next. It requires refusing to let the present eliminate every alternative.

    What protecting an aperture looks like

    Protected exploration does not have to mean an innovation lab separated from the real work. It can begin with a few operating choices:

    • Separate delivery work from exploratory work so the two are not judged by identical expectations.
    • Give small experiments explicit sponsors, modest budgets, and expiration dates.
    • Ask which measures reflect the purpose and which merely prove compliance.
    • Record anomalies before explaining them away.
    • Invite authentic dissent from people who actually hold a different view.
    • Require experiments to produce learning before requiring them to produce scale.
    • Periodically ask what problem each recurring process still solves.
    • Retire rituals whose connection to outcomes can no longer be demonstrated.

    These practices will not reveal the next paradigm on command. That is not the promise. Their value is that they preserve variation long enough for the organization to learn from it.

    Jim Dator’s four generic futures include continuation, collapse, discipline, and transformation. Frick’s argument rearranges that sequence, but the categories remain useful. Organizations are usually comfortable planning for continuation. They can imagine collapse because fear supplies the story. They understand discipline because tightening control feels actionable.

    Transformation is harder because it cannot be fully described in the language of the system it may replace.

    The practical question is therefore not whether modernity, an industry, or a company is truly at the end of its life. The better question is diagnostic: are our institutions still producing results, or are they spending more of their energy demonstrating loyalty to the way those results used to be produced?

    A process deserves protection when it remains connected to purpose. When that connection is gone, enforcing the process more intensely will not restore it. Leadership begins by noticing the difference and preserving enough room for another possibility to become visible.

    Listen and read further

    Eric Pratum and Eliot Frick on The Unfolding Thought Podcast.
    Listen to Eliot Frick on The Unfolding Thought Podcast.
  • Blame Is What Organizations Use Instead of Learning

    Blame Is What Organizations Use Instead of Learning

    A project misses its deadline. A customer leaves. A machine fails. A campaign spends the budget and produces almost nothing.

    The review begins with a reasonable question: What happened?

    But the question rarely remains open for long. Someone was careless. Someone did not communicate. Someone lacked urgency. Someone should have known better.

    Once the organization has a name, it also has a remedy. Give feedback. Add training. Put a note in the performance review. Replace the person if the failure was serious enough. The meeting ends with the satisfying feeling that accountability has occurred.

    Then a different person encounters the same incentives, the same missing information, the same overloaded process, and the same failure happens again.

    The organization did not solve the problem. It purchased narrative closure at the cost of understanding.

    In her episode of The Unfolding Thought Podcast, Factor.AI co-founder Lindsay McGregor describes what she calls the blame bias: our tendency to explain poor performance through the character of the person closest to the outcome, even when the surrounding system did more to produce it.

    That insight is often softened into a pleasant leadership slogan: blame the system, not the person. But the implication is more demanding than the slogan. System thinking does not remove accountability. It expands accountability beyond the person with the least power to change the conditions.

    Blame is what organizations use when they want the appearance of accountability without the work of learning.

    Blame compresses the causal field

    Every meaningful organizational outcome has more causes than can fit comfortably into a meeting.

    A missed deadline may involve a poor individual decision. It may also involve an unrealistic estimate, a sales promise made without delivery input, shifting priorities, a dependency no one owned, incentives that rewarded saying yes, and a reporting process that made trouble visible only after recovery was impossible.

    Blame compresses that causal field into a person. It converts a difficult investigation into a familiar moral story: a responsible person would have produced a different result.

    Social psychologist Lee Ross gave the fundamental attribution error its name in 1977. We tend to overestimate stable traits when explaining another person’s behavior and underestimate the situation in which the behavior occurred. In ordinary language, we see what someone did and quickly decide what kind of person would do it.

    Distance makes the story easier. An executive sees a careless operator. A person standing beside the machine sees the awkward control, the rushed handoff, the warning light everyone has learned to ignore, and the production target that makes stopping the line feel dangerous.

    The executive may have more authority and more data. The operator often has more causal knowledge.

    Blame gives an organization a culprit. Accountability gives it a next action.

    The same people can produce a different organization

    McGregor illustrates the power of context through NUMMI, the automobile plant General Motors and Toyota operated together in California.

    The plant’s previous workforce had been described as unreliable, antagonistic, and nearly impossible to manage. Toyota reopened the facility with many of the same workers but a different operating system. Employees were trained to identify problems, stop production, suggest improvements, test ideas, and treat quality as something they helped create rather than something management inspected after the fact.

    The people did not receive new personalities. The work gave different behaviors a reason to emerge.

    A California Management Review study of NUMMI describes how broad job classifications, teamwork, job rotation, employee involvement, and continuous improvement replaced direct supervision as the primary mechanism for performance. The point was not simply to be nicer to workers. It was to make their judgment part of the production system.

    W. Edwards Deming estimated from his experience that 94 percent of troubles and possibilities for improvement belonged to the system and were therefore management’s responsibility. The number should not be treated as a universal law. Its distribution of responsibility is the more important point.

    The higher a person sits in the organization, the more power that person usually has to shape goals, incentives, workload, information flow, staffing, tools, decision rights, and consequences. Yet performance conversations often place the greatest explanatory burden on the people with the least authority over those conditions.

    A system explanation does not say nobody is responsible. It asks whether responsibility has been assigned in proportion to power.

    The system is not an alibi

    There is an obvious objection. Some people lie, neglect their obligations, mistreat colleagues, or knowingly violate an important rule. A leader who explains every action through context can become as unserious as one who explains everything through character.

    System thinking should not erase agency. It should improve diagnosis.

    Four questions belong in the same review:

    • What choice did the person make?
    • What conditions made that choice more likely, more rational, or harder to detect?
    • Who had the authority to change those conditions before the event?
    • What individual and system changes will make recurrence less likely?

    An employee can be responsible for deception while a manager is responsible for a target that rewarded it. A manager can be responsible for ignoring a warning while an executive team is responsible for a culture in which delivering bad news ends careers. These responsibilities do not cancel one another.

    A system explanation does not erase individual responsibility. It reveals who had the power to prevent recurrence.

    Designing for the exception changes everyone’s work

    Bad actors create another system problem: they are memorable.

    McGregor describes the remote employee discovered to be working two full-time jobs. The violation is real. The leader’s anger is understandable. The danger comes next, when the organization redesigns work as though every employee were waiting for a chance to cheat.

    More monitoring appears. Decision rights narrow. Work becomes visible through activity rather than results. Approval steps multiply. The system may catch another offender. It also teaches conscientious employees that their judgment is not trusted and that appearing busy is safer than experimenting with a better way to work.

    Control is not free. It consumes attention, delays decisions, encourages performance theater, and transfers discretion away from the people closest to the problem.

    Research by Richard Ryan and Edward Deci on self-determination theory identifies autonomy, competence, and relatedness as conditions that support intrinsic motivation and healthy self-regulation. A control added for one exceptional case can weaken those conditions for everyone else.

    The design question is not whether to trust people blindly. It is how to contain misconduct without making the misconduct the model of human behavior on which the entire organization is built.

    When leaders design for the worst employee they can imagine, they often create the worst workplace everyone else has experienced.

    Blame destroys evidence

    The deepest cost of blame is not hurt feelings. It is lost information.

    James Reason distinguished the person and system approaches to error in a foundational article on human error. The person approach treats errors as products of inattention, carelessness, poor motivation, or moral weakness. Its remedies include retraining, new procedures, discipline, and shame. The system approach begins with the fact that people are fallible and asks how working conditions can prevent an error or limit its consequences.

    A blame-oriented review teaches employees to manage exposure. They disclose less, describe uncertainty more carefully, and wait until a problem is undeniable before attaching their names to it. The organization receives cleaner reports and worse knowledge.

    Amy Edmondson’s study of psychological safety and learning behavior found that teams where people felt safe taking interpersonal risks engaged more in behaviors such as discussing errors, seeking feedback, and experimenting. Learning behavior, in turn, helped explain performance.

    This does not mean every mistake should feel comfortable. It means the organization must be able to hear an accurate account before it decides what the account requires.

    A good metric can look like bad performance

    Systems also determine what counts as evidence.

    In the Toyota system McGregor describes, pulling the andon cord made a problem visible and could stop production. A manager optimizing only for short-term output might see fewer cord pulls as improvement. A manager responsible for learning might worry that fewer pulls meant employees had stopped surfacing problems.

    The same number can therefore describe two different organizations. One has fewer problems. The other has fewer reported problems.

    Most performance systems are much better at counting completed work than adaptive work. They measure units, calls, revenue, utilization, deadlines, and hours. They rarely measure useful questions, early warnings, experiments, prevented errors, or ideas that improved the process.

    When the visible score rewards output and the invisible score contains learning, people rationally protect output. Then leadership interprets the resulting silence as evidence that the system works.

    Accountability should end with a changed system

    A learning review should not begin by assuming innocence. It should not begin by assuming guilt either. It should begin by preserving the size of the question.

    Useful reviews ask:

    • What did the person know at the time, and what could that person reasonably have known?
    • What made the action seem sensible, necessary, or safe in that moment?
    • Would a capable peer in the same conditions have been likely to act differently?
    • Which target, workload, handoff, tool, incentive, or norm increased the probability of failure?
    • Where could an earlier signal have changed the outcome?
    • What individual choice requires correction?
    • What system change will make the better choice easier, earlier, or more visible?
    • Who owns that change, and how will the organization know it worked?

    If the review ends only with feedback for the employee, the organization has probably stopped one level too soon. If it ends only with a vague promise to improve the culture, it has stopped several levels too early.

    Accountability becomes real when it creates an obligation to repair. The employee may need to change a behavior. The manager may need to change the work. The executive may need to change the incentive that made the behavior predictable. Each owner should leave with an action proportionate to the power that owner had over the conditions.

    Learning requires a longer explanation

    Blame survives because it is emotionally efficient. It turns ambiguity into certainty, causation into character, and management failure into an employee problem.

    Learning is slower. It asks leaders to understand work they may have only seen through dashboards. It makes them examine controls they approved, incentives they praised, and constraints they never personally experienced. It may reveal that the person who made the visible mistake was adapting to a less visible mistake in the design.

    That is not softness. It is a more exacting form of accountability because it refuses to confuse punishment with prevention.

    Blame asks who deserves the pain. Accountability asks who owns the repair.

    Listen and read further

    Episode artwork for Lindsay McGregor’s appearance on The Unfolding Thought Podcast.
    Listen to Lindsay McGregor on The Unfolding Thought Podcast.
  • A Strategy That Cannot Fail Is Not a Strategy

    A Strategy That Cannot Fail Is Not a Strategy

    A leadership team asks for a strategy. What it really wants is a guarantee.

    The executives want to know which campaign will produce the forecasted revenue, which technology will create the promised efficiency, which market will grow, and which reorganization will solve the problem without creating another one. The strategist can provide research, models, experience, and a recommendation. What the room wants is certainty.

    So everyone participates in a familiar performance. Assumptions become projections. Projections become targets. Targets become commitments. The presentation grows more precise as the underlying situation remains stubbornly unpredictable.

    If the plan works, its authors were prescient. If it fails, they can point to the data, the methodology, the consultant, or the industry standard. Every decision was defensible. No one quite decided.

    This is not strategy. It is responsibility laundering.

    In his episode of The Unfolding Thought Podcast, strategist Steve Kozel describes strategy as a series of nested choices. At any altitude, he argues, strategy requires multiple feasible options, an understanding of the situation, a desired effect, and a choice among the alternatives.

    That definition carries a consequence organizations often try to avoid: if the alternatives are genuinely feasible and the future is genuinely uncertain, the choice can be wrong.

    A strategy that cannot fail is not a strategy. It is either an operating procedure, a foregone conclusion, or a story told to make uncertainty feel controllable.

    Strategy begins where prediction ends

    There are decisions for which certainty is a reasonable expectation. Payroll should run. An invoice should calculate correctly. A proven manufacturing process should stay within tolerance. When cause and effect are stable and repeatable, leaders should demand reliability.

    Strategy is different because it concerns choices whose value depends on reactions that have not happened yet. Competitors respond. Customers reinterpret what they want. Employees change the plan while implementing it. Technology alters the economics. The choice itself changes the environment in which its success will be judged.

    Frank Knight drew a useful distinction in Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit. Risk describes situations in which probabilities can be estimated. Uncertainty describes situations in which the probabilities themselves are not reliably knowable.

    Most organizations are comfortable managing risk. They create ranges, reserves, scenarios, and controls. They struggle when uncertainty cannot be converted into a percentage. The absence of a reliable probability feels like the absence of management.

    But uncertainty is not a temporary defect in the strategy process. It is the condition that makes strategy necessary. If the correct action and its outcome were already known, the organization would not need a strategist. It would need an operator.

    A plan becomes strategy only when it contains a consequential choice and accepts the possibility of being wrong.

    Certainty has a job inside the organization

    The demand for certainty is not simply a reasoning error. It serves an organizational purpose.

    A confident forecast lets a project receive funding. A familiar methodology reassures procurement. A famous consultancy gives an executive cover. A dashboard suggests control. A best practice allows everyone to say the decision met the accepted standard.

    These things reduce personal exposure even when they do not reduce uncertainty. That difference matters.

    Kozel calls the deeper pattern “Fear OS,” an unspoken operating system in which people are expected to maintain control, avoid failure, produce positive metrics, and explain the world as though it were more rational than it is. Under those conditions, the safest decision is often the one whose failure will be easiest to defend.

    This helps explain why a company can be filled with intelligent people and still repeat choices no one strongly believes in. Each participant is responding rationally to a local incentive. The analyst avoids an unsupported recommendation. The manager protects the quarterly number. The executive selects the respectable vendor. The board receives a forecast with enough detail to feel governed.

    The organization has not eliminated uncertainty. It has distributed responsibility so thoroughly that the eventual result will seem to belong to no one.

    Best practice cannot create strategic advantage

    Best practices are valuable when the goal is dependable execution of a known activity. I want the people operating an airplane, administering medication, or securing financial data to use procedures that have survived serious scrutiny.

    The problem begins when leaders ask best practice to answer a strategic question.

    Michael Porter’s explanation of strategy centers on a unique position, trade-offs, and fit among activities. Strategy requires choosing what not to do. An organization that copies the accepted practices of its category may become more competent. It does not become meaningfully different.

    This is the contradiction Kozel surfaces in the episode. Organizations want a proven solution and an advantage. They want evidence without experiments. They want innovation without the waste, ambiguity, and failed attempts through which new knowledge is produced.

    If every competitor follows the same research, hires the same experts, adopts the same technology, and optimizes against the same benchmark, best practice becomes a convergence mechanism. It improves the category while compressing the differences within it.

    Best practice can improve execution. It cannot explain why the company should win.

    An experiment is not an excuse

    None of this means leaders should become casual about evidence or celebrate failure as a cultural virtue.

    “We are experimenting” can become its own form of responsibility laundering. Teams can use the language of learning to excuse poor preparation, unclear goals, oversized bets, and projects that continue long after the original hypothesis has collapsed.

    A real experiment is more demanding than a confident plan because it must say what is not known and how the organization intends to learn it.

    Amy Edmondson describes an intelligent failure as an undesired result in new territory. The attempt should pursue a meaningful goal, rest on an informed hypothesis, and be no larger than necessary to produce the needed knowledge.

    Those constraints turn experimentation from a slogan into a management discipline.

    • What specific assumption are we testing?
    • What evidence would increase or reduce our confidence?
    • What is the smallest credible action that can produce that evidence?
    • What downside are we exposing, and who has agreed to it?
    • When will we stop, expand, or change direction?
    • Where will the learning alter a decision, budget, process, or belief?

    The purpose of an experiment is not to make failure harmless. It is to buy information at a price the organization can afford.

    Learning must reach the assumptions

    Organizations often claim to learn while protecting the belief that produced the disappointing result.

    A campaign misses its target, so the team changes the creative. A product struggles, so marketing receives a larger lead goal. A transformation stalls, so managers schedule more training. The response corrects activity without reconsidering the governing assumption.

    Chris Argyris distinguished this kind of correction from deeper learning. Single-loop learning asks how to perform the existing approach more effectively. Double-loop learning asks whether the underlying goals, rules, and assumptions still deserve to govern the work.

    In his work on defensive reasoning, Argyris argued that capable professionals often respond to difficulty by avoiding examination of their own contribution to it. Expertise can make the defense more articulate without making it less defensive.

    This is why adding more data does not necessarily make an organization more empirical. Data can test a claim. It can also decorate a conclusion the organization is unwilling to reconsider.

    Double-loop learning creates a more uncomfortable review:

    • Did the execution fail, or was the strategic premise wrong?
    • Are we improving the offer, or only improving the way we promote it?
    • Does the metric represent value, or is it merely easy to make rise?
    • Are we asking a team to solve a problem whose cause sits above its authority?
    • What would we stop believing if we took this result seriously?

    If every review ends with a better way to execute the same idea, the organization is not learning strategically. It is becoming more efficient at defending the past.

    Exploitation wins the quarterly argument

    Even leaders who understand this problem face a structural disadvantage.

    James March’s classic paper on exploration and exploitation in organizational learning describes the tension between refining what an organization already knows and searching for new possibilities. Exploitation produces clearer, nearer, and more predictable returns. Exploration is uncertain, delayed, and frequently disappointing.

    That asymmetry gives the known approach an advantage in every budgeting cycle. The established product has revenue. The existing channel has benchmarks. The familiar process has owners. The new option has a hypothesis.

    March warned that adaptive processes can become effective in the short run and self-destructive in the long run because organizations refine exploitation faster than exploration. The company becomes increasingly competent at a world that is becoming less relevant.

    This is another reason certainty can be dangerous. It does not merely misdescribe the future. It systematically moves resources toward whatever already has a history.

    The most dangerous experiment is the one an organization is already running while pretending the outcome is guaranteed.

    What honest strategy sounds like

    An honest strategy does not replace confidence with vagueness. It makes confidence proportional to evidence.

    It names the choice. It explains why this option is preferable to other feasible options. It distinguishes what is known from what is assumed. It defines the risk the organization is accepting. It makes clear who owns the decision. It identifies the earliest evidence that would justify changing course.

    It also separates commitments from predictions.

    A leader can commit to allocating resources, protecting an experiment, reviewing evidence, and changing direction when the premise no longer holds. A leader cannot honestly commit that customers, competitors, employees, regulators, and technology will behave according to the forecast.

    This kind of strategy can sound less impressive in the room. It replaces false precision with boundaries, hypotheses, and decision rules. It admits that expertise improves a choice without making the future obedient.

    That is not weaker leadership. It is leadership willing to remain responsible after the illusion of control has been removed.

    The choice comes before the certainty

    Organizations do not need more comfort with failure in the abstract. They need a more precise relationship with uncertainty.

    Preventable mistakes should be prevented. Known processes should be reliable. Large irreversible choices deserve more scrutiny than small reversible ones. Evidence should shape judgment wherever evidence exists.

    But strategy cannot wait until the uncertainty has disappeared. By then, the choice may be obvious, the advantage may be gone, or the organization may have spent years perfecting the wrong thing.

    The discipline is to decide without pretending to know, act without becoming reckless, and learn without protecting the assumptions that made the action possible.

    Strategy is not a promise that the future will obey. It is a commitment to choose, learn, and remain accountable before certainty arrives.

    Listen and read further

    Episode artwork for Steve Kozel’s appearance on The Unfolding Thought Podcast.
    Listen to Steve Kozel on The Unfolding Thought Podcast.