Inbound & Agile

Tag: Strategy

  • 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

  • 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 Cloud Has a Utility Bill. Who Pays When the Forecast Is Wrong?

    The Cloud Has a Utility Bill. Who Pays When the Forecast Is Wrong?

    What happens when a technology company explores building the same data center in several states, encourages each one to compete for the project, chooses the place that offers the best combination of price and speed, and walks away from the rest?

    Long before the decision is made, utilities and communities have already begun studying substations, transmission, generation, reserve capacity, land, incentives, and staffing. That planning costs real money. Some equipment and contracts may need to be reserved years before anyone knows whether the server racks will arrive.

    Who bears that cost when the company chooses somewhere else? Usually not the company that created the competition.

    The company keeps the option to change its mind. Utilities, communities, and ratepayers can be left with the cost of preparing for a future that never arrives.

    That is the less obvious infrastructure problem underneath the AI boom. It is not simply that data centers need enormous amounts of electricity. It is that technology companies can make fast, reversible bets while the systems competing to serve them must begin making slow, difficult-to-reverse commitments.

    That was the tension I kept hearing in my interview with Peter Kelly-Detwiler on The Unfolding Thought Podcast. Peter has spent decades in electricity markets. He describes data centers that place enormous interconnection requests because access to power may determine whether an AI investment succeeds. He also describes utilities trying to distinguish committed demand from speculative demand when the cost of guessing wrong can remain on customer bills for decades.

    AI moves in quarters. The grid moves in decades.

    The cloud has encouraged us to think of computing as nearly weightless. A company adds capacity, moves a workload, or releases a new model, and the change appears to happen everywhere at once. The physical system beneath that experience moves differently.

    Power plants, transmission corridors, and substations are not software deployments. They require land, equipment, permits, financing, engineering, and public consent. Once built, they are expected to serve customers long enough to recover their cost.

    Meanwhile, the demand forecast is changing at software speed. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s 2025 update estimated that U.S. data centers used about 4.7 percent of the nation’s electricity in 2024. Its reference case reaches 11.8 percent in 2030, while the modeled range runs from 9.5 to 15.3 percent. The authors caution that those bounds are not a confidence interval and that the most extreme assumptions are unlikely to occur together. The uncertainty is not a flaw in the research. It is evidence of the problem planners face.

    The North American Electric Reliability Corporation’s 2025 long-term assessment says data centers account for most of the projected increase in electricity demand over the next decade. It also describes projects that slow down, disappear, or consume far less than originally requested. In Texas, planners reduced projected demand from newer data centers after operating sites used, on average, about half of the capacity they had requested.

    The same forecast can therefore contain a real signal and a large amount of noise. The system may need much more power. It does not follow that every proposed megawatt will appear where and when an application says it will.

    A request for power is not the same as demand

    A developer benefits from preserving options. If it can apply for capacity in several regions, it can compare timelines, incentives, energy prices, regulatory conditions, and construction risks before choosing a site.

    That is rational behavior for the developer. It becomes a system problem when every option is treated as a commitment.

    If five utilities each prepare to serve the same project, society may reserve equipment, engineering time, and capital for four facilities that will never exist. If every utility heavily discounts every request, the one project that is real may arrive before the grid is ready.

    Traditional forecasting tries to estimate which future is most likely. That is necessary, but it cannot answer the more important governance question: who should carry the cost when the forecast is wrong?

    The problem is not uncertainty. The problem is allowing one party to create uncertainty while another party pays for it.

    A forecast should not be a blank check

    When a utility builds dedicated infrastructure for a large customer, the customer is receiving something more valuable than electricity. It is receiving an option on future capacity.

    An option has value even if it is never exercised. Equipment may be ordered. Other customers may be told that capacity is unavailable. A transmission plan may be changed. Capital that could have served another need may be committed.

    The contract should make that option visible. Deposits, milestone payments, minimum-demand charges, exit fees, and long-term commitments are not punishments for innovation. They are ways to keep a private option from becoming a public liability.

    This principle is now moving into regulation. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has called for cost-recovery agreements that protect other customers if infrastructure is built for a large load that does not arrive as planned. The point is straightforward: the party best positioned to judge whether a project is real should retain a meaningful share of the risk that it is not.

    A forecast should guide an investment. A contract should decide who carries the risk if the forecast is wrong.

    Speed to power has a price

    Peter uses the phrase “compute heat rate” for the electricity price at which the value of additional computation no longer justifies operating the data center. The concept matters because it reveals how differently an AI company and an ordinary customer may value the same megawatt-hour.

    For most businesses and households, electricity is a meaningful operating expense. For a company racing to train or deploy a valuable model, electricity can be the input that determines whether billions of dollars of chips produce revenue or sit idle.

    That can make time-to-power more important than the price of power. It explains the interest in co-located generation, private power plants, batteries, and temporary arrangements that let a project begin operating before the larger grid connection is ready.

    There is nothing inherently wrong with paying for speed. The problem comes when the price is hidden in another customer’s bill, in reduced reliability, or in infrastructure that remains after the business case disappears.

    The best new load may be a flexible one

    A data center is often described as a load, as though it were simply an enormous appliance. That leaves out an important possibility. Some computational work can move in time, move to another location, or briefly draw on onsite storage and generation.

    That flexibility can be valuable because the grid is built for its most difficult hours, not its average hour. A facility that avoids adding to the annual peak can consume more total electricity without requiring the same amount of new capacity.

    Electric Power Research Institute modeling found that shifting portions of data-center demand away from constrained hours reduced peak demand, the need for firm capacity, and the average price of electricity supplied to the facilities. EPRI is also testing operational approaches through its Data Center Flexible Load Initiative.

    Flexibility should not be treated as a hopeful description. It should be a measurable operating commitment. Different workloads have different latency, availability, and geographic constraints. A promise to reduce demand is useful only if the grid operator knows how much, how quickly, for how long, and with what consequences.

    The same is true of reliability. NERC’s work on emerging large loads warns that data centers can change consumption quickly enough to create risks the grid was not designed to manage. The facility cannot claim the reliability benefits of grid connection while treating its own electrical behavior as someone else’s problem.

    Build what remains useful when the forecast is wrong

    Uncertainty does not justify paralysis. It should change the order in which investments are made.

    Some improvements create value across many possible futures. Better sensors and dynamic line ratings can reveal when existing transmission lines safely carry more power. Advanced conductors can move more electricity through an existing right-of-way. Storage can reduce short peaks and improve power quality. More planners, engineers, and regulatory capacity can shorten decisions without pretending the decisions are simple.

    The Department of Energy describes these grid-enhancing technologies as faster ways to unlock capacity from infrastructure that already exists. They do not eliminate the need for new generation and transmission. They buy time, improve utilization, and remain useful if a particular data center never appears.

    Larger dedicated investments should follow stronger evidence of commitment. They can be staged against financing, land control, equipment orders, construction progress, and binding load agreements. The evidence required should rise with the irreversibility of the decision.

    • How much of the requested load is supported by committed capital and construction milestones?
    • Which investments benefit the wider system and which exist only for this customer?
    • What flexibility can the customer demonstrate and contractually guarantee?
    • Who pays if the project arrives late, operates below forecast, or disappears?
    • Which decisions can be staged, and which would be difficult to reverse?

    The grid does not need certainty about AI. It needs commitments proportional to the uncertainty AI creates.

    Planning is becoming a form of risk design

    The AI electricity debate is often framed as a choice between acceleration and restraint. Build everything quickly and risk higher costs, stranded assets, and reliability problems. Move slowly and risk losing investment, innovation, and economic opportunity.

    That framing is too narrow. The more useful question is how to make a sequence of decisions that remains sensible across several plausible futures.

    We do not need to know exactly how many proposed data centers will be operating in 2035. We need connection rules that distinguish curiosity from commitment. We need contracts that put project risk close to the party creating it. We need flexible operating agreements that make new demand useful to the grid when possible. We need public investments that retain value even when a private forecast fails.

    AI may transform the economy. It may also pass through investment cycles that make today’s confident forecasts look naive. The grid has to function in either case.

    That is why the deepest infrastructure skill is no longer prediction. It is designing commitments, options, and safeguards so that we can build before uncertainty disappears without pretending uncertainty has disappeared already.

    A household should not become an involuntary venture investor merely because someone else’s investment happens to plug into its grid.

    Listen and read further

    Peter Kelly-Detwiler and Eric Pratum on The Unfolding Thought Podcast.
    Listen to Peter Kelly-Detwiler 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.
  • 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.
  • Organizations Cannot Change Until They Grieve What Is Ending

    Organizations Cannot Change Until They Grieve What Is Ending

    A leadership team learns that the future it planned for is not going to arrive.

    The market moved. The merger did not create the expected value. A technology changed the economics of the business. Customers stopped behaving the way the strategy assumed they would. The product that once organized the company’s identity is becoming less important every year.

    So the leaders schedule a strategy session.

    They bring in new data, debate scenarios, revise the forecast, rename a few priorities, and leave with a transformation plan. Yet the plan still depends on the future they were supposed to have abandoned. The same products must remain central. The same people must retain authority. The same capabilities must be protected. The same story about why the organization matters must survive.

    The strategy is new. The future underneath it is not.

    In her episode of The Unfolding Thought Podcast, futurist and death doula Juli Rush brings an unusual idea into the work of foresight: sometimes a future has to be treated as something that is dying.

    That language may sound too intimate for a strategy meeting. I think that is precisely why it is useful.

    Organizations are usually comfortable discussing change as an analytical problem. They are much less comfortable discussing it as a loss. But a future can disappear before a company, community, or person has emotionally and structurally stopped living inside it. When that happens, more evidence does not necessarily create movement. The organization may understand what has changed and still be unable to act as though it understands.

    A plan is never just a plan

    We like to imagine that a strategic plan is a neutral description of choices, resources, and expected results. It is also a collection of promises.

    It promises a salesperson that a market will continue to value the relationships she spent twenty years building. It promises a product leader that the expertise which made him important will remain important. It promises an executive that the organization he knows how to lead will still exist. It promises employees that the sacrifices they made were part of a story that leads somewhere.

    Those promises are rarely written in the plan. They are still real.

    This is one reason organizations can acknowledge a change intellectually while rejecting its consequences operationally. They accept that the market is different, then preserve the budget built for the old market. They say the business must become more customer-centered, then leave decision rights with the functions furthest from the customer. They describe a legacy product as declining, then require every new investment to protect its revenue, status, and internal constituency.

    The future in a strategy is not just a forecast. It is a promise about what will matter, who will matter, and which sacrifices will have been worthwhile.

    Research on organizational identity helps explain why this is so difficult. In one study of employees going through a corporate takeover, people adjusted better when they could experience either continuity with a valued identity or the gain of a credible new one. When neither path was available, strong identification with the old organization could deepen the loss.

    The implication is not that leaders should preserve everything people value. That would make meaningful change impossible. It means that ending a plan can also disturb status, competence, community, memory, and identity. If leaders discuss only the business case, they leave the rest of the transition to happen underground.

    Facts cannot end a future people are still living inside

    When change stalls, leaders often assume the missing ingredient is information.

    They commission another market study. Add detail to the transformation roadmap. Ask finance for a more precise forecast. Build a larger dashboard. Bring in a consultant to repeat what people inside the organization have already been saying.

    Sometimes better evidence is exactly what is needed. Sometimes the evidence has already done its job.

    The problem is that evidence can tell us a choice is no longer working without dissolving our attachment to it. In Barry Staw’s classic research on escalation of commitment, people became more willing to invest in a failing course of action when they felt personally responsible for having chosen it. More information did not automatically produce better correction. Responsibility could become a reason to defend the past.

    Organizations make this effect collective. A strategy acquires sponsors, specialists, reporting lines, incentives, rituals, and language. Entire careers grow around making it appear sensible. By the time the evidence turns, the organization is not reconsidering an isolated decision. It is reconsidering part of itself.

    This is why a declining initiative can survive years of disappointing results. Each round of investment is described as the final adjustment needed to prove the original idea. Each delay protects the people involved from having to decide what the ending means.

    There is an important difference between uncertainty and ambiguity. Uncertainty means we do not yet know which outcome will occur. Ambiguity can mean we do not even agree on what is ending, what remains, or what the loss should be called.

    Psychologist Pauline Boss developed the idea of ambiguous loss to describe losses that resist clean resolution. The organizational version is obviously not equivalent to the disappearance or psychological absence of a loved one. The concept is still useful. A company can announce a transformation while leaving the former system half-alive. People lose familiar roles but continue to be measured against their old responsibilities. A strategy is declared over, but no one can say which commitments are actually released.

    Nothing has clearly died, so nothing can be fully grieved or replaced.

    Resistance is often grief with an operational vocabulary

    In business, grief rarely announces itself as grief.

    It sounds like a request for more proof. A concern about timing. A debate over scope. A warning that customers are not ready. An insistence that the old process needs one more quarter. A proposal to run the new model without taking resources from the old one.

    Any of those objections might be valid. Treating every disagreement as an emotional reaction is a convenient way for leaders to avoid criticism. But treating every objection as an analytical judgment is equally convenient. It allows the organization to negotiate indefinitely with a future that has already left.

    Resistance is often grief with an operational vocabulary.

    The popular habit of assigning organizational change to a neat sequence of grief stages is not especially helpful. Grief is not a predictable staircase, and employees are not patients to be managed through denial on the way to acceptance. People can support a strategic decision and still mourn what it removes. They can be excited by a new role and miss the competence they felt in the old one. They can disagree with the decision for sound reasons while also feeling threatened by it.

    The useful move is not diagnosing people. It is making the losses discussable.

    What will employees no longer be proud of? Which relationships will become less central? What expertise will carry less authority? Which customer, community, or tradition will feel abandoned? What story about the organization will no longer be true?

    If leaders cannot answer those questions, they probably do not yet understand the change they are asking other people to make.

    Hospice: stop treating the incurable as a turnaround

    Rush has since formalized her work as a framework of Hospice, Vigil, and Compost. Those three words describe work that conventional strategy often skips.

    Hospice begins with a difficult distinction: what needs more effort, and what needs an ending?

    Leaders are rewarded for fixing, growing, and sustaining things. Ending something can feel like admitting that the prior investment was mistaken. That makes it tempting to label every failing system a turnaround opportunity.

    But purpose and mechanism are not the same. A university can remain committed to learning while ending a program. A company can remain committed to customers while retiring the product through which it once served them. A nonprofit can remain committed to a need while admitting that its intervention no longer produces the intended result.

    Hospicing a future does not mean declaring the work worthless. It means stopping the attempt to make one mechanism immortal.

    Practically, I would ask leaders to make the ending specific:

    • Which assumption no longer deserves to organize the strategy?
    • Which product, process, role, or investment will stop?
    • What evidence made that decision necessary?
    • What would cause the organization to reconsider?
    • Who has the authority to prevent the ending, and for how long?

    Without that specificity, “letting go” becomes another slogan sitting on top of unchanged budgets and power.

    Vigil: stay with the loss long enough to learn

    Organizations are often impatient with the space between an ending and a replacement.

    A product is discontinued on Monday and the new growth narrative is presented on Tuesday. A reorganization is announced with a slide explaining why everyone should be excited. A founder leaves, and the company immediately declares that the culture will not change.

    That speed is meant to create confidence. It can also communicate that what people invested in the old future is inconvenient.

    A vigil does not require months of therapeutic meetings or ceremonial language that feels false to the organization. It requires enough attention to distinguish what should end from what should be honored.

    What did the old strategy make possible? Which capabilities did it create? What did people learn while making it work? Which relationships and values should survive its end? What harm did it cause that should not be romanticized?

    This matters because organizations frequently make one of two mistakes. They preserve the old system so completely that the new future cannot emerge, or they denounce the old system so completely that people who built it hear the change as an indictment of their contribution.

    Neither produces honest learning.

    The vigil is where a company can say, “This served us, and it cannot take us where we need to go.” Both halves of that sentence matter.

    Compost: carry forward what can still feed the system

    Compost is not preservation. The original form does not survive.

    What survives are elements that can become useful in a different system.

    A legacy product may contain customer knowledge the new team needs. A discontinued program may have built a community that should not disappear with its budget. A failed strategy may reveal a capability the organization undervalued because it was attached to the wrong outcome. A departing leader may carry relationships and tacit knowledge that cannot be transferred through a folder of documents.

    Composting asks a harder question than, “What lessons did we learn?” Organizations answer that question too easily. They produce a list, thank the team, and return to work.

    The better question is, “Where will the lesson live?”

    Will a decision rule change? Will a metric disappear? Will authority move? Will a capability receive funding? Will a hiring profile change? Will a customer promise be rewritten? If the old strategy taught something but nothing in the operating system changes, the organization did not compost the experience. It buried it.

    This cannot become change-management theater

    There is an obvious danger in bringing the language of grief into organizational life. Leaders can use it to make a decision feel humane without making the decision itself more honest.

    A ritual cannot compensate for a deceptive explanation. Listening sessions do not create dignity if the outcome was predetermined and leaders pretend otherwise. Honoring the past is not meaningful if employees absorb every cost while executives protect their own roles. Asking people to grieve can become insulting when the organization refuses to name who chose the change and who benefits from it.

    If nothing stops, loses funding, or gives up authority, the ending was symbolic.

    The work of ending a future does not replace strategy. It makes strategy testable.

    A responsible ending should show up in the allocation of money, attention, people, and decision rights. It should release someone from an obsolete expectation. It should create room for a new experiment that the old strategy would have crowded out. It should make clear which part of the organization’s identity is a purpose worth carrying and which part was only one temporary expression of that purpose.

    The most strategic question may be: what has ended?

    Most strategy processes begin with some version of, “What future do we want?”

    It is a necessary question. It may not be the first one.

    Before an organization can choose a future, it may need to identify the future it is still trying to recover. The market position that is not coming back. The growth curve that depended on temporary conditions. The career ladder built for work that no longer exists. The cultural story that stopped matching employees’ experience. The strategy that succeeded once and became an identity long after it stopped being an advantage.

    Rush’s insight is not that organizations should become preoccupied with endings. It is that beginnings become more credible when endings receive real attention.

    The future is not built on an empty site. It is built amid structures, promises, loyalties, and expectations that already occupy the ground. Some deserve to be restored. Some deserve to be repurposed. Some deserve a careful ending.

    The strategic discipline is knowing which is which, and having the courage to make the distinction operational.

    Sometimes the most responsible beginning looks a little like a funeral.

    Listen and read further

    Episode artwork for Juli Rush’s appearance on The Unfolding Thought Podcast.
    Listen to Juli Rush on The Unfolding Thought Podcast.