Inbound & Agile

Tag: The Unfolding Thought Podcast

Blame Is What Organizations Use Instead of Learning
A project misses its deadline. A customer leaves. A machine fails. A campaign spends the budget and produces almost nothing.

The review begins with a reasonable question: What happened?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blame compresses the causal field

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The same people can produce a different organization

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The system is not an alibi

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

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

Four questions belong in the same review:
- What choice did the person make?
- What conditions made that choice more likely, more rational, or harder to detect?
- Who had the authority to change those conditions before the event?
- What individual and system changes will make recurrence less likely?
An employee can be responsible for deception while a manager is responsible for a target that rewarded it. A manager can be responsible for ignoring a warning while an executive team is responsible for a culture in which delivering bad news ends careers. These responsibilities do not cancel one another.

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

Designing for the exception changes everyone’s work

Bad actors create another system problem: they are memorable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blame destroys evidence

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

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

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

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

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

A good metric can look like bad performance

Systems also determine what counts as evidence.

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

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

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

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

Accountability should end with a changed system

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

Useful reviews ask:
- What did the person know at the time, and what could that person reasonably have known?
- What made the action seem sensible, necessary, or safe in that moment?
- Would a capable peer in the same conditions have been likely to act differently?
- Which target, workload, handoff, tool, incentive, or norm increased the probability of failure?
- Where could an earlier signal have changed the outcome?
- What individual choice requires correction?
- What system change will make the better choice easier, earlier, or more visible?
- Who owns that change, and how will the organization know it worked?
If the review ends only with feedback for the employee, the organization has probably stopped one level too soon. If it ends only with a vague promise to improve the culture, it has stopped several levels too early.

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

Learning requires a longer explanation

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

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

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

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

Listen and read further
Listen to Lindsay McGregor on The Unfolding Thought Podcast.
March 30, 2026
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
Listen to Steve Kozel on The Unfolding Thought Podcast.
December 1, 2025
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
Listen to Juli Rush on The Unfolding Thought Podcast.
March 17, 2025