Why Programmes Fail in the First 30 Days, Before Anyone Admits It

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By the time a programme is declared in trouble, the failure is usually months old.

The governance review that triggers the intervention, the escalation that finally reaches the executive team, the moment someone says out loud what everyone has privately known for weeks. None of that is when the failure started. It is when the failure became undeniable.

The real decisions that determined the outcome were made in the first thirty days. In rooms that were not minuted. In conversations that were not followed up. In the silence where challenge should have been.

I have stepped into enough programmes to know this pattern. And the reality is that by the time you are called in to fix something, you are not dealing with a delivery problem. You are dealing with the compounded consequences of a foundation that was never properly laid.

Bain & Company’s 2024 survey of more than 400 executives found that 88% of business transformations fail to achieve their original ambitions. Most of those failures were not caused by what happened in month six. They were caused by what was decided, or not decided, in month one.

 

The Thirty-Day Window Nobody Takes Seriously Enough

Every programme has a formation period. A window, roughly the first month, where the critical decisions that will shape everything downstream are being made, often informally, often without the weight they deserve.

This is when scope is being interpreted, not just defined. When the people who will actually do the work are forming their first impressions of the leadership, the culture, and whether honesty will be safe here. When the relationships between workstreams are either being built deliberately or left to chance. When assumptions are being made that nobody has written down because everyone assumes everyone else shares them.

Most organisations treat this period as setup. As administration. As the unglamorous precursor to the real work.

It is the real work. Everything that follows is either built on what was established here or fighting against what was not.

The thirty-day window is where programmes are won or lost. We just do not find out until much later.

 

The Scope That Nobody Challenged

Here is where it starts, almost every time.

The scope arrives with the programme. It comes from somewhere, a business case, a procurement process, a senior stakeholder’s vision, a consultancy’s recommendation. It has been approved. It has a budget attached to it. It has a go-live date.

And in the first thirty days, the people now responsible for delivering it read it, sense the problems, and say nothing.

Not because they are incompetent. Because the environment has not established that challenge is welcome. Because the approval process gives scope a kind of authority that makes questioning it feel like insubordination. Because there is pressure, spoken or unspoken, to project confidence rather than raise doubt.

So the assumptions embedded in the scope go unexamined. The dependencies that are not owned by anyone get noted and moved past. The timeline that was built on optimism rather than evidence gets accepted as a constraint rather than interrogated as a risk.

PMI’s 2025 Project Success research found that a clear vision of success at the outset gives projects a Net Project Success Score of +41. The absence of that clarity produces a score of -18. A 59-point swing, determined before the plan is even baselined.

And the programme sets off carrying weight it was never designed to carry. The team knows it. The experienced ones, anyway. But the conversation that would surface it has not happened. So the weight gets managed quietly, worked around, absorbed, until the point when it cannot be anymore.

That point arrives later, visibly, dramatically, in a way that looks sudden.

It was not sudden. It was decided in week two when nobody pushed back on the plan.

 

The Relationships That Were Never Built

Programmes are delivered by people who depend on each other across workstreams, across organisations, across cultural and institutional boundaries that no project plan captures.

Those dependencies only work if the relationships underneath them work. And relationships, real ones, the kind where someone will tell you the truth at 6pm on a Thursday when the news is bad, are not built in kick-off presentations and introductory calls.

They are built in the unglamorous, unscheduled moments of the first thirty days. The informal conversations. The one-on-ones that were not on the plan. The deliberate investment in understanding who the key people are, what they actually care about, what they are worried about, and what they need from you to show up fully.

Most programmes do not make this investment. Leaders are too focused on getting the governance structures right, the plans baselined, the first steering pack prepared. The relational architecture gets left to develop on its own.

It does not develop on its own. It either gets built or it does not. And when it does not, you find out in month four when a critical dependency stalls because two workstream leads have never actually talked, when a key stakeholder disengages because nobody made them feel like a genuine part of the programme, when the supplier relationship that looked functional on paper turns out to have no real trust underneath it.

The fix at that point takes weeks. The investment in week one would have taken an afternoon.

 

The Conversations Nobody Documented

This one is quieter. Harder to see. But just as damaging.

In the first thirty days of any programme, hundreds of micro-decisions get made in conversations that never make it into the formal record. Someone interprets a requirement and moves on. Two people informally agree on a boundary between workstreams that later becomes a gap nobody owns. A risk gets raised in a corridor and managed privately rather than surfaced. An assumption gets made about what the business actually wants that nobody validates because everyone is too busy moving.

These conversations create the real operating model of the programme. Not the governance framework. Not the RACI. The informal, undocumented, human architecture of how this programme will actually function.

When that architecture is sound, when the right conversations happened and the right things got clarified, programmes have a resilience that is hard to explain on paper. They absorb setbacks. They surface problems early. They self-correct.

When it is not sound, the gaps compound. Every week, the distance between the documented reality and the lived reality grows. The risk register reflects what people were willing to write down, not what is actually keeping them up at night. The plan reflects what was agreed in the room, not what the people closest to the work know is actually achievable.

And somewhere around month three or four, the gap becomes too large to manage quietly.

 

The Culture That Set Before Anyone Noticed

The most underestimated consequence of the first thirty days is cultural.

Within a month, every person on a programme has formed a working theory of how this environment operates. Is honesty safe here? Does leadership want the truth or does it want reassurance? What happens to the person who raises a problem? Do they get support or do they get blame? Is this a place where people cover for each other or compete with each other?

These conclusions get drawn from small evidence. The way the programme director responded to the first piece of bad news. Whether the first difficult conversation was handled with directness or avoided. Whether the team lead who flagged a risk was thanked for it or made to feel like they were creating problems.

People are extraordinarily good at reading these signals. They adapt fast. And once the culture has set, once the team has learned what is rewarded and what is penalised, changing it is one of the hardest things in programme leadership.

Research by Milliken, Morrison and Hewlin, published in the Journal of Management Studies, found that 85% of employees had felt unable to raise an important issue or concern with their boss, even when they believed it mattered. That figure will not surprise anyone who has led a programme in distress. The information existed. The team knew. Nobody said it.

I have been in programmes where the psychological safety was so low by month two that meaningful escalation had effectively stopped. Not because the problems had stopped. Because the team had learned that surfacing problems did not help them. That information would travel upward selectively, defensively, shaped to protect the messenger rather than inform the leader.

That culture was established in the first thirty days. Nobody designed it. Nobody intended it. But every small signal, every early interaction, every moment where tone was set rather than thought about, built it brick by brick.

And it was almost impossible to dismantle in month five.

 

What the First Thirty Days Actually Requires

It requires a leader who understands that the work of the first month is not administrative. It is foundational.

It requires the courage to challenge scope before the plan is baselined, even when the pressure is to move quickly. Because the conversation you avoid in week one becomes the crisis you manage in month six.

It requires the deliberate investment in relationships that will not show any return for weeks. The conversations that feel like a luxury when the governance structure needs building and the steering pack is due. They are not a luxury. They are the infrastructure.

It requires the explicit establishment of culture, not through a values statement or a team charter, but through behaviour. Through how you respond to the first piece of bad news. Through whether you ask for honesty or perform as though you want it while rewarding those who tell you what you want to hear.

It requires the discipline to document the undocumentable. To make explicit the assumptions, interpretations, and informal agreements that will otherwise compound silently until they cannot be managed.

And it requires humility. The humility to know that what you do not understand about this organisation, this culture, and these people in the first thirty days will cost you more than anything on the risk register.

 

The Post-Mortem Nobody Gets Right

Most post-mortems on failed programmes look at the wrong timeline.

They analyse month seven, when the slippage became undeniable. Month five, when the critical path was already broken. Month four, when the relationships between key workstreams had deteriorated beyond functional.

The real analysis belongs in month one. In the decisions that were made without enough information. The challenges that were not raised. The relationships that were not prioritised. The culture that was allowed to form without intent.

By the time a programme looks like it is failing, it has been failing for a long time.

The window where it could have been different closed thirty days in.

Most organisations do not realise that. So they keep investing in better governance frameworks, more sophisticated reporting tools, and more rigorous steering processes, applied at the stage of the programme where the outcome is already largely determined.

The intervention that would actually change the failure rate happens at the beginning. In the unglamorous, under-valued, insufficiently serious first thirty days.

That is where programmes are won.

That is where most of them are lost.

Already Building: Epic Agent Factory and the Governance Gap

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The pre-mortem on Epic Agent Factory asked who would answer when a health-system-built agent made a clinically significant error. It published on 9 June. I have since learned of a Becker’s Hospital Review report from 30 March confirming that one of America’s largest health systems had already been building those agents for weeks before the question was published.

It confirms the pre-mortem’s central argument. Neither the research nor the article surfaced how quickly the sequence had already begun.

 

The Deployment That Was Already In Motion

Advocate Health had already tapped Epic’s Agent Factory, becoming one of the first health systems to build and deploy agents through the platform. Andy Crowder, Advocate Health’s SVP and Chief Digital and AI Officer, described the direction in a LinkedIn post on 26 March: “By combining Epic’s Agent Factory Platform capabilities with Advocate Health’s scale, clinical insight, and commitment to innovation, we’re translating AI from promise into practice.” He pointed to a three-day Epic immersion at The Pearl innovation district in Charlotte, focused on speeding up pharmacy verification for complex medications and cutting infusion chart preparation time for pharmacists and nurses. Four working prototypes emerged, scheduled to go live in July 2026.

Crowder added: “Together, we’re advancing responsible, practical AI that fits naturally into clinical workflows, reduces friction, and gives clinicians back time to focus on what matters most.” It is a considered statement, and the commitment is genuine. But it is not a governance document. And Advocate Health is not unusual here. They are representative. They moved first because the platform enabled it, the commercial pressure to reduce administrative burden was real, and nothing in the regulatory landscape said stop.

This is the sequence the pre-mortem described. Capability arrived. Deployment followed. The governance architecture to surround it had not been ratified.

 

The Workflows That Come Next

Pharmacy verification and infusion chart preparation are not, in themselves, clinical decision-making. They reduce documentation burden and carry genuine operational value. But they are the entry point, not the ceiling.

Epic’s own Penny agent already handles prior authorisation for thousands of health systems. Agent Factory is the platform through which health systems build their own versions of exactly those capabilities. Prior authorisation sits at the intersection of clinical judgment and payer approval. An AI-generated argument that misrepresents a contraindication, omits a relevant diagnosis, or positions a clinical case in a way that leads a payer to deny appropriate care causes harm that is downstream and deniable. The agent did not make the clinical decision. But the agent shaped the argument that influenced it.

The pre-mortem’s central question, who owns the error, was always pointed at this trajectory. The agent is built by the health system, on Epic’s platform, using Curiosity’s foundation models, in a regulatory environment where no one has yet specified how liability is allocated between vendor and deployer. Advocate Health’s prototypes are the first step of a sequence that leads directly to that question.

 

Colorado Tried to Build the Rails

While health systems were building, legislators in Colorado were attempting to create the governance scaffolding that the platform lacks at a federal level. Three separate AI-related healthcare laws had been passed by June 2026, each addressing a different dimension of the problem, and each confirming the same underlying gap.

Colorado’s original AI Act, SB 24-205, was scrapped before it ever took effect. A legal challenge from X.AI in April 2026, supported by federal intervention from the DOJ, led to enforcement being suspended and the legislature repealing the law entirely. Its replacement, SB 26-189, was signed on 14 May. It is a narrower law, retaining consumer notice requirements and the right to meaningful human review following adverse outcomes, but dropping the duty-of-care standard and mandatory impact assessments that had made the original controversial. It takes effect January 1, 2027.

HB 26-1139, signed on 2 June, constrains how payers use AI in coverage determinations. It requires that AI-driven decisions be based on the patient’s individual medical and clinical history rather than group data, and that any denial or delay of coverage based on medical necessity receive review by a licensed clinician. It too takes effect January 1, 2027.

Together, SB 26-189 and HB 26-1139 create obligations on both sides of the prior authorisation workflow. Neither specifies who bears the cost when an agent-generated output leads to the wrong clinical outcome. Three laws confirming the gap exists is not the same as closing it.

 

The Sequence Is Not a Prediction. It Is a Pattern.

On 1 June 2026, eight days before the pre-mortem was published, the Joint Commission launched its first voluntary AI certification programme for healthcare organisations. Built on the initial guidance published with the Coalition for Health AI in September 2025, the certification covers governance, data management, risk and bias reduction, and monitoring. It is a meaningful step forward. But the certification recognises organisations, not individual tools. It does not validate or certify individual AI products. It contains no discussion of liability allocation. It is a framework for responsible intent, not a mechanism for accountability when something goes wrong.

Epic has not published a liability framework specifying what a health system owns when a self-built Agent Factory agent produces a clinical error. No Epic contract language or public terms of service document does so. No federal regulatory body has published guidance specifically addressing liability allocation for agentic AI operating within EHR environments. The FDA has authorised more than 1,400 AI-enabled devices and issued no specific enforcement guidance for agentic AI in EHR environments.

The pre-mortem’s conclusion was that if Epic published a clear liability framework and paired it with a safety review mechanism, Agent Factory could become the defining infrastructure layer of hospital AI over the next decade. That conclusion stands. What the evidence now confirms is that the clock is not running from some future launch date.

It was already running.

Tokens Don’t Run Transformation Programmes

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Somewhere right now, a CFO is presenting a slide that frames it as: tokens or headcount. Allocate to AI infrastructure, reduce salary costs, reinvest in capability. The maths is clean. The logic looks compelling. The slide is wrong.

The phrase “tokens or humans” has entered the corporate vocabulary fast. CNBC ran it as a headline in May 2026 and they were right to, because it captures something real: organisations are now making explicit choices between paying for people and paying for AI. But the framing treats it as a resource allocation problem. It isn’t. It’s a transformation governance problem, and most organisations are making the call before they understand what they are trading away.

 

The Numbers Look Better Than They Are

More than 142,000 tech jobs have been cut in 2026 already. Amazon, Meta, Salesforce, Block, Cloudflare. Executives are public about the logic: AI agents handle what humans used to, smaller teams move faster, capital gets redirected to infrastructure. The numbers are real.

So are these: over 80% of companies using AI showed no productivity benefit in a February 2026 study. Uber burned through its entire annual AI coding budget in four months. Microsoft cancelled a large tranche of Claude Code licences after six months. Productivity gains in controlled studies can be significant. In most real-world settings, the gains are a fraction of what those studies suggest, if they materialise at all.

Token prices are falling, yes. Gartner projects a 90% reduction by 2030. But Goldman Sachs projects a 24-fold increase in enterprise token consumption over the same period. The unit cost goes down; the total bill goes up. Companies reporting their AI budgets exhausted in one or two months are not outliers. They are the pattern.

The trade-off that looks like a saving is, in many cases, a substitution of one cost for a more volatile, harder-to-govern one.

 

You’re Cutting the Wrong People

Here is the part executives are not discussing on those slides.

When organisations reduce headcount to fund AI infrastructure, they do not cut at random. They cut operational staff, programme delivery roles, change management functions, middle management layers. These are the roles that look like friction. In a spreadsheet, they are the easiest cost to justify removing.

In a transformation, they are the load-bearing walls.

The tacit knowledge that keeps a complex programme on track does not live in a document or a prompt. It lives in the people who have navigated the politics three times before, who know which stakeholders will quietly block a decision, who understand why the last attempt failed. AI does not have that context. More importantly, it cannot build it. It can only work with what you give it.

When transformation programmes stall, which they do with regularity, the most common cause is not a lack of technology. It is a lack of people who know how to move organisations through change. Cutting those people to fund AI tools that have not yet delivered consistent productivity returns is not a strategy. It is a bet. And it is a bet being made with institutional knowledge that cannot be easily rebuilt.

 

The Governance Question Nobody Is Asking

Most boardroom conversations about tokens versus humans are efficiency conversations. They should be risk conversations.

Specifically: what is the reversibility of this decision? Hiring back experienced programme delivery professionals, change managers, and technology integrators in a tighter labour market is slow and expensive. The talent you let go walks straight into competitor organisations or into consulting. You do not get it back on demand.

Meanwhile, the AI infrastructure you are funding with those savings is subject to vendor pricing changes, model deprecation cycles, and adoption curves that are far less predictable than a salary line. The White House’s own March 2026 AI governance framework acknowledged the workforce transition risk. State lawmakers introduced hundreds of AI-related bills in 2025. Political and regulatory pressure is accelerating.

Boards approving headcount reductions to fund AI should be asking: what is our recovery plan if the productivity gains do not arrive on the timeline assumed? Few are.

 

What Good Decision-Making Looks Like Here

The organisations getting this right are not choosing between tokens and humans. They are sequencing the decisions differently.

They are deploying AI where the productivity case is proven and measurable: customer-facing automation, code assistance, data analysis, routine administrative work. And they are preserving the human capability needed to execute the transformation that makes AI integration actually work.

They are building governance frameworks around AI spend with the same discipline applied to capital programmes: defined outcomes, stage gates, budget controls, and exit criteria if results do not materialise. They are not treating AI infrastructure as a guaranteed return.

They are also being honest internally about what is driving the headcount decisions. If cost pressure is the real driver and AI adoption is the justification, that is worth naming clearly. Obscuring the actual motivation behind a technology narrative creates cultural damage that outlasts the short-term saving.

 

The Slide Does Not Run the Programme

The “tokens or humans” framing will stick around because it captures something real about the economics of 2026. But it is a simplification that is costing organisations more than they realise.

The numbers are not the decision. The decision is how you get from where you are to where you need to be. That still requires people who know what they are doing.

Your AI Isn’t the Problem. Your Organisation Is.

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The technology isn’t the problem. It never was.

CEOs have finally said what transformation leaders have known for years. According to CIO.com‘s 2026 digital transformation analysis, a growing view at board level is this: AI adoption is failing because of workforce dysfunction and management failure, not because the tools aren’t good enough. The tools are excellent. The organisations deploying them are not ready.

That sounds like progress. It is not, entirely. Because the honest follow-on question, the one almost nobody is asking out loud, is this: what does it actually cost to fix an organisation that isn’t ready? And more to the point, who is being straight about that number?

 

The Comfortable Diagnosis

Acknowledging a workforce problem is easier than solving one. I have seen this pattern many times. The conversation shifts, the language changes, and suddenly the organisation is talking about upskilling programmes, change management workshops, and appointing a Chief AI Officer. Comfortable. Budgeted. Deliverable. Launch event confirmed.

Also insufficient.

What CEOs are actually describing is a change architecture challenge. Not a training programme. Not a comms plan. How do you get a workforce to reconfigure around fundamentally different ways of working, without losing the institutional knowledge and relationships that make the business worth anything? That takes years. In my experience, the failure rate is high, and rarely discussed honestly before the programme starts. And it requires a very different kind of leadership than deploying technology does.

 

What Boards Have Not Priced In

Technology investment decisions follow a familiar pattern. The vendor presents the business case. The pilots show strong results. The board approves the budget. The programme launches.

What nobody puts on that slide is the organisational cost of change. Not the cost of the technology. The cost of the human system that has to absorb it. The management bandwidth consumed. The productivity drop during transition. The cultural resistance that does not show up in workshops but absolutely shows up in usage data six months after go-live. The governance rework needed before AI-assisted decisions can actually be trusted.

Boards have been pricing in technology risk. They have not been pricing in change architecture risk. Those are different categories, and conflating them is precisely how organisations end up with expensive tools and thin results. The numbers bear it out. CIO.com‘s analysis of AI misconceptions found that 42% of companies abandoned most AI initiatives in the past year, up from 17% the year before. That is not a technology failure rate. That is an organisational one.

 

The Consultancy Pivot Is Real, and Worth Watching

The market is starting to notice. As Florian Douetteau, CEO of Dataiku, put it: “Instead of selling cloud migrations and data platforms, consultants will start selling organisational rewiring to prepare for AI-run operations.”

He is right. And executives need to tell the difference between genuine expertise and repackaged change management with AI branding.

The signal is specificity. Anyone selling organisational rewiring should be able to answer three questions: What does the post-rewired organisation look like, and how is it materially different from today? How do you measure progress at the midpoint, not just the end? And what happens when it does not go to plan?

Vague answers are a warning sign. If the firm cannot describe the failure modes honestly, they are probably not equipped to help you navigate them.

 

The Transformation Leader’s New Mandate

The transformation leader’s remit has shifted. It is no longer primarily about technology deployment. It is about change architecture: the sequencing, the governance, the capability-building, the stakeholder management that lets an organisation absorb new ways of working without destabilising what already works.

Harder to sell on a slide. Harder to put an end date on. Harder to celebrate in a press release. But it is the actual work, and anyone who has run a transformation programme at scale knows it.

The practical implication: if you are accountable for AI adoption and spending more time managing technology vendors than managing your leadership team’s readiness to change, you are working on the wrong problem.

 

Three Things Worth Doing Now

Start with an honest capability audit, not of your technology stack, but of your management layer. Which leaders have the resilience to sustain adoption pressure? Which ones will quietly resist in ways that never surface in a steering group but absolutely show up in usage data? You need to know before you scale.

Re-examine your success metrics. If the primary measures are deployment milestones and licence utilisation, you are measuring the technology, not the adoption. Add behavioural indicators: how are decisions being made differently, how has workflow changed, what are managers doing that they were not doing before?

And build the longer timeline into the plan, not as a caveat but as a structural reality. If your board believes this is an eighteen-month programme and you privately know it is a four-year change effort, that gap will surface. Better now, through a direct conversation, than in a programme review where the numbers no longer make sense.

 

The Gap Is the Risk

The AI is ready. Most organisations are not. The risk is not the gap. The risk is the pretence that it is smaller than it is, approving investment on that basis, and finding out the real cost when there is no runway left to correct it.

Honesty about the gap is not pessimism. It is the foundation of a credible plan.

AI Deployment Without Governance Is Not Transformation

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AI deployment without governance is not transformation. It is expensive experimentation.

Most organisations know this. And most organisations are doing it anyway.

The pressure to deploy is real. Boards are asking about it. Competitors are announcing it. Technology vendors are selling it with a conviction that borders on evangelical. And so CIOs, CTOs, and transformation directors are buying, piloting, integrating, and announcing. The pace of activity is impressive. The demonstrable results, when you look past the press releases and the internal communications, are considerably less so.

The problem is not the technology. The tools are genuinely capable, some remarkably so. The problem is what has been skipped in the rush to deploy: the governance infrastructure that determines whether AI investment creates accountable, measurable, sustainable value, or simply generates activity that resembles transformation while the underlying risks accumulate, unmanaged and unmeasured.

 

What Ungoverned AI Actually Looks Like

Every organisation that has rushed deployment without the infrastructure to support it shows the same patterns.

Proliferation without accountability. AI tools appear across departments, purchased by individual teams, integrated into workflows, processing sensitive data, producing outputs that influence decisions. Nobody owns it. Nobody monitors it. Nobody is accountable when something goes wrong. And something will go wrong.

Measurement without meaning. Leaders can tell you how many tools have been deployed, how many users are active, how many hours have been saved. What they cannot tell you is whether those savings translate to outcomes that matter, or whether the metrics being tracked were chosen because they were easy to collect rather than because they were meaningful. The reporting looks credible. The underlying picture is opaque.

Risk without recognition. AI systems inherit the biases in the data they are trained on. They produce errors in ways that are not always visible. They embed themselves in decision-making processes in ways that are difficult to unpick. Without governance structures that surface and manage these risks, organisations are running exposures they have not modelled and cannot quantify. This matters in every sector. In healthcare and financial services, it is potentially catastrophic.

Adoption without sustainability. Most AI deployments stall not because the technology fails, but because the human system around it was never properly designed. People use the tool when it is mandated. They stop when the mandate loosens. The promised transformation does not materialise because the operational disciplines required to embed new ways of working were never built. The pilot looked like a success. The programme was not.

 

Why Governance Gets Skipped

Because it is slower than deployment. Because it requires difficult conversations about accountability that nobody wants to have in a climate of enthusiasm and competitive anxiety. Because governance sounds like bureaucracy to people who have come to associate progress with pace.

The irony is that skipping governance does not make things faster. It makes the eventual reckoning slower, more expensive, and considerably more painful. An AI system embedded across an organisation’s core processes without proper oversight is not an asset. It is a liability with a very good PR strategy.

The organisations that have moved most decisively into AI without governance infrastructure are not ahead. They are exposed. They have made commitments they cannot sustain, taken risks they cannot quantify, and created dependencies they cannot easily exit. That is not a position of strength. It is a position of fragility that has not yet been tested.

 

What AI Governance Actually Means

Not a committee. Not a policy document on an intranet page that nobody reads. Not a risk register reviewed quarterly and then filed. Those are the bureaucratic imitations of governance. The real thing is different.

Real AI governance means someone is accountable for every deployed AI system, with a clear mandate, clear authority, and clear consequences when standards are not met. It means data quality is a precondition for deployment, not an afterthought. It means risk frameworks are designed before tools go live, not retrofitted after something fails. It means adoption is planned around outcomes, not headcount or activity metrics.

It also means the organisation has an honest view of its own readiness. Not every process is ready for AI. Not every dataset is clean enough. Not every team has the change capability to absorb a significant operational shift. Good governance makes that assessment before investment is committed. Not after.

There is also a strategic dimension that is frequently missed. AI governance is not just a risk management function. It is a value protection function. Organisations that govern well can identify what is working, scale it deliberately, and stop what is not working before it becomes costly. Organisations that do not govern well discover problems at the worst possible time: through failures that are visible, expensive, and in the current regulatory environment, increasingly public.

 

Three Questions Worth Asking Before the Next Deployment

Who is accountable for the outcomes of this AI system, defined by the results it produces, not the tool it deploys?

How will we know if this is working, measured by the things that actually matter, not the metrics that are easy to count?

What are the risks we have not fully modelled, and who owns them?

If the answers are unclear, the organisation is not ready to deploy. It is ready to experiment. And experimentation, at the scale and pace of current AI investment, is not a cost most organisations have properly accounted for.

The organisations that will extract durable value from AI are not the ones moving fastest. They are the ones that have built the infrastructure to know what is working, why it is working, what the risks are, and what to do when things go wrong.

That infrastructure is governance. And without it, transformation is not what you are doing.

Pre-Mortem: Epic Agent Factory

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Update, 14 June 2026: One of America’s largest health systems was already building Agent Factory agents in late March, weeks before this piece published. This new piece confirms the central argument.

 

Epic unveiled Agent Factory at HIMSS 2026 (March 2026), positioning it as a no-code, drag-and-drop visual builder that lets health systems design, deploy, and monitor their own autonomous AI agents inside the Epic environment. Alongside it came Curiosity, a family of generative medical foundation models trained on deidentified records from 300 million patients across 310 health systems, backed by a research preprint on arXiv first published in August 2025. Together, the announcements represent Epic’s move from AI vendor to AI infrastructure provider, handing health systems the tools to build clinical automation at their own pace and on their own terms.

A pre-mortem is a discipline borrowed from project risk management. Before a programme succeeds or fails, you ask: if this does not go as planned, what was the mechanism? This series applies that lens to major AI-in-industry announcements, not to predict failure but to surface the questions that deserve answers before deployment, not after.

 

The Bet

Epic is betting that health systems want to own their AI destiny. Phil Lindemann, VP of Data and Research, framed Agent Factory as enabling customers to implement AI solutions without needing to call a vendor or write a line of code. That is a significant commercial and philosophical shift. Epic’s existing suite, Art, Penny, and Emmie, has posted credible numbers: 42 per cent reduction in prior authorisation submission time at Summit Health, 58 per cent sustained reduction in billing-related service messages at Rush University, 69 per cent early lung cancer detection at The Christ Hospital against a 46 per cent national average. The bet is that health systems, given those results as proof of concept, will want to build the next generation themselves.

 

The Assumption

The assumption underneath Agent Factory is that health system capability is ready to meet platform capability. Canvas Medical CEO Adam Farren noted in HIMSS 2026 commentary that most hospitals are not yet positioned to take advantage of the platform. Agent Factory is in early phase, with first availability in 2026 and continued rollout in 2027. Epic’s own roadmap, and the organisational readiness required for clinical agent deployment, put realistic momentum at leading health systems two to three years out. The platform may well be sound. The question is whether the organisations it serves have the clinical informatics depth, the governance infrastructure, and the project bandwidth to build and validate autonomous agents safely, particularly in clinical rather than administrative workflows.

 

The Sequence

Epic shipped the capability before any ratified standard governs what happens when a health-system-built agent makes a clinically significant error. The Joint Commission and Coalition for Health AI published voluntary joint guidance in September 2025, covering governance structures and vendor management. The FDA has authorised over 1,400 AI-enabled devices but has published no specific enforcement guidance for agentic AI in EHR environments. No federal regulatory framework yet specifies how liability for agent-generated clinical errors should be allocated between vendor and deploying health system. The capability is real and available. The governance architecture to surround it is not yet ratified.

 

The Pager

When an Agent Factory-built agent makes a clinically significant error, who owns it? Epic’s public framing places health systems “in the driver’s seat.” That is a positioning statement, not a governance document. No published contract language, terms of service excerpt, or named executive statement specifies who bears liability for agent-generated errors. No Epic accountability framework for self-built agents has been published. KPMG’s Q4 AI Pulse Survey (2025) found that 75 per cent of large-enterprise leaders name security, compliance, and auditability as their top requirements for agent deployment. At present, the answer to the pager question is that nobody has publicly claimed the call.

 

The Proof

Curiosity carries published research behind it: a preprint on arXiv first submitted in August 2025, covering 118 million patients and 151 billion tokens via the CoMET architecture. That is a meaningful evidential bar. Agent Factory has no equivalent published validation. Epic’s self-reported statistic that more than 85 per cent of customers are actively using Epic AI is plausible given market penetration of 43.7 per cent of US hospitals by count and 56.9 per cent by beds, but it refers to the existing suite, not to Agent Factory specifically. No performance benchmarks, error rate thresholds, or clinical outcome commitments for health-system-built agents on Agent Factory appear in any public source.

 

Verdict

If Epic publishes a clear liability framework that specifies what health systems own when they deploy self-built agents, and pairs that with a safety review mechanism before clinical agents go live, Agent Factory could become the defining infrastructure layer of hospital AI over the next decade. The foundation is genuinely strong: real outcome data from deployed agents, a clinically substantiated foundation model, and a market position that no competitor can easily replicate. The Curiosity publication demonstrates that Epic is capable of meeting an external evidential standard. The question is whether it applies that same rigour to the governance scaffolding around Agent Factory before health systems start building in earnest, rather than after the first serious incident forces the issue.

The Most Important Leadership Skill in 2026 is Knowing What NOT to Automate

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Every company now has access to the same AI tools. The same large language models. The same automated workflows. Efficiency has moved from competitive advantage to baseline expectation. If your edge is speed and scale, it is an edge almost everyone has.

The leaders who are winning are not the ones who automated the most. They are the ones with the discipline to stay manual where it actually matters.

 

The efficiency trap

The logic is seductive. If a machine can do it 90% as well at a fraction of the cost, the decision seems obvious. So you automate the feedback loop. You automate the check-in with a direct report. You automate the client thank-you.

But when you automate a human connection, you do not save time. You delete the value. If a process is designed to build trust and you remove the person from it, you have removed the trust.

Efficiency is the right lens for a workflow. It is the wrong lens for a relationship.

 

Three things you should never automate

1. Contextual mentorship

An AI can give a junior team member the best-practice answer. It cannot tell them how that answer sits inside the specific, messy history of your organisation, why a certain stakeholder is sensitive about a particular decision, or what is actually at stake in the conversation they are about to have. Leadership provides the why. The model provides the what. Those are not the same job.

2. Hard conversations

Gallup’s 2025 State of the Global Workplace report records global employee engagement at its lowest level since 2020. The cost: $10 trillion in lost productivity. The primary driver of that collapse is not strategy, pay, or economic uncertainty. It is managers. Managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement. And manager engagement itself has fallen nine points since 2022, the sharpest sustained decline in years. The quality of the manager’s hardest interactions determines the majority of how engaged a team is. The performance conversation. The difficult feedback. The call that someone is not right for the role.

Automated performance reviews. AI-generated feedback. Algorithmically produced bad news. These are not efficiency gains. They are abdications. If you are not willing to sit with someone through a difficult conversation, you have not earned the right to lead them. Automation of conflict is one of the fastest ways to destroy a culture, and it tends to do it quietly, one avoided interaction at a time.

3. Visionary intuition

Algorithms are retrospective. They look at what has happened to predict what might happen. Leadership is prospective. It requires the willingness to take a risk the data does not yet support, to make a call before the pattern is clear, to back a direction the model would not have recommended.

A BCG and Harvard Business School study of 758 consultants using GPT-4 found that when tasks fell outside the model’s capability, consultants using AI were 19 percentage points less likely to produce correct solutions than those working without it. AI makes experienced people wrong more often when the problem requires genuine judgment. That is precisely where leadership is most needed.

If the algorithm is making your strategic pivots, you are not leading. You are following a script.

 

The question to ask before you automate anything

Stop asking whether something can be automated. Most things can. Start asking:

If the recipient knew this was automated, would they feel less valued?

If the answer is yes, keep it manual. That is the test. Not cost. Not speed. Not capacity. Whether removing the person removes the point.

 

Presence is the advantage now

Gallup’s 2025 report is plain about what the solution is not. More software will not reverse a decline caused by managers becoming less human. More meaningful human connection will.

In a landscape where everything is optimised, the things that are not optimised stand out. The intentional choice to spend time where it is not scalable is increasingly rare. That rarity is the advantage.

Efficiency gets you into the room. Presence is what keeps you there.

Stop trying to be a more efficient machine. Start being a more present human.

You Didn’t Transform. You Digitised

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Most organisations that have spent the last five years claiming digital transformation have not transformed anything. They have taken broken processes, outdated thinking, and dysfunctional ways of working, and moved them online. That is not transformation. That is digitisation with a better slide deck. And the reason it keeps happening is not technology. It is not budget. It is not even capability. It is the fact that real transformation is genuinely uncomfortable, and most leaders are not willing to do what it actually requires.

 

The Lie We Have Been Telling Ourselves

Somewhere along the way, the industry decided that transformation meant deploying new platforms. Move to the cloud. Implement the ERP. Launch the patient portal. Go live by Q3. And when the system went live, someone in the boardroom called it a success.

McKinsey’s research, tracking digital transformation outcomes across more than 1,500 executives globally, found that fewer than 30% of digital transformation programmes achieve their stated goals. When the definition of success is tightened to organisations that both improved performance and sustained those improvements over time, the figure drops to 16%. The transformation was declared. The programme was closed. The leadership team moved on. And the results did not follow.

The same pattern is now playing out in artificial intelligence investment. Organisations are deploying AI tools at pace, adding automation to existing workflows, and calling the outcome transformation. The underlying question, whether the organisation has genuinely changed how it thinks, decides, and operates, goes unasked. The tools change. The organisation does not.

What actually happened on the ground: the same approval bottlenecks that existed in the paper process existed in the digital one. The same data quality problems that plagued the spreadsheet now plagued the database. The same people who did not trust each other before the system launched still did not trust each other after it. The technology arrived. The transformation did not. Because transformation was never on the project plan.

 

What You Actually Did

MIT researchers studying digital capability across more than 400 global organisations identified four categories of digital maturity. At the top: Digital Masters. High investment in technology, high investment in leadership and operating model transformation. Consistent outperformers.

At the bottom of the performance curve: what the researchers called “digital fashionistas.” High technology investment. Low operating model and leadership change. They look like digital leaders. They have the tools, the platforms, the dashboards, and the announcements. They consistently underperform the organisations that did both. The research, published in Leading Digital (Westerman, Bonnet and McAfee, Harvard Business Review Press, 2014), found that what separates genuine digital leaders from organisations that merely digitise is not technology investment. It is the depth of change to operating model and leadership capability that sits alongside it.

The fashionista is not a reckless organisation. It is a capable one that solved the easier half of the problem. Technology procurement has clear timelines, visible outputs, and measurable spend. You can point to it in a board presentation. Changing how an organisation makes decisions, how it tolerates uncertainty, how it deploys talent, how it responds to what customers actually do rather than what the strategy assumed they would do, that work is slower, harder, and less photogenic. So the easy half gets done. The hard half gets deferred. And the deferral becomes permanent.

Digitisation has real value. I am not dismissing it. But it does not change what is possible. It does not challenge why a process exists in the first place. It does not ask whether the workflow serving the organisation in 2010 should still be serving it today.

I have walked into healthcare systems where clinicians were still duplicating data entry across three platforms because no one had the political will to consolidate them. I have seen government programmes where the digital portal replicated a form-filling exercise that should have been eliminated entirely. I have watched organisations spend eight figures on enterprise systems and then rebuild their old spreadsheet workarounds alongside them, because the system did not fit how people actually worked, and no one was willing to change how people actually worked. New technology. Old thinking. Zero transformation.

 

Why Real Transformation Is Harder Than Anyone Admits

Consulting firm BCG surveyed 825 senior executives on their digital transformation experience. Approximately 70% reported falling short of the value they expected. The consistent pattern in that data, and in the broader body of research on transformation failure, is not a technology shortfall. The technology largely worked. What did not work was the organisational and cultural infrastructure around it. Organisations deployed new capability into old structures. New tools into old decision-making patterns. New data into organisations that did not know how to act on it.

Genuine transformation requires something that technology cannot deliver and no vendor will sell. It requires leaders to look at the way their organisation functions and be honest about what is not working, not just inefficient, but fundamentally wrong. Wrong structures. Wrong incentives. Wrong assumptions baked into processes that have never been questioned because they have been there too long for anyone to remember why.

That conversation is threatening. It implicates decisions made by people still in the room. It requires dismantling things that gave people power, status, or comfort. It means telling parts of the organisation that the way they have worked for a decade is the problem, not the solution. Most leaders are not willing to have that conversation. So instead, they commission a technology programme and call it transformation. It feels like action. It produces visible outputs. And it avoids the harder truth entirely. The technology becomes the distraction from the real work.

 

The Questions That Would Actually Change Something

Real transformation starts before any platform is selected, any vendor is appointed, or any project plan is written.

It starts with questions most organisations never ask.

Why does this process exist? Not how does it work, but why does it exist? What problem was it designed to solve, and is that still the problem we have?

Who benefits from keeping this the way it is? Because in every organisation, there are people whose influence depends on information asymmetry, manual steps, or processes that only they understand. Digital transformation threatens that. And those people will, consciously or not, find ways to make sure it does not fully land.

What behaviour needs to change, not just what system needs to be replaced? Because if that question cannot be answered before go-live, the transformation will fail after it.

What are we willing to stop doing? Every genuine transformation requires eliminating something. A process, a role, a way of making decisions. If nothing has been stopped, nothing has been transformed.

 

The Leader’s Role Nobody Talks About

This is where most transformation discourse goes quiet.

Because the answer to why transformation fails is almost always leadership. Not IT leadership. Not programme leadership. Senior organisational leadership.

The leaders who delegated transformation to a project team and checked in quarterly. The ones who approved the technology investment but never showed up to the change management conversation. The ones who said they needed to transform in the all-hands and then protected every structural thing that made transformation impossible.

Transformation cannot be delegated. Implementation can. But the decisions that actually change an organisation, who has authority, how work flows, what gets measured, what behaviour gets rewarded, those decisions sit at the top. When leadership avoids them, the project team delivers what they can. They go live. They hit their milestones. And the organisation looks digitised, not transformed.

 

What Transformation Actually Looks Like

I have seen it done well. Not often, but I have seen it.

It looks like a leader standing in front of their organisation and naming the real problem, not the technology gap, but the cultural or structural one underneath it. It looks like decisions being made that upset people, because those people were benefiting from the dysfunction. It looks like processes being eliminated, not just automated. It looks like the technology arriving last, after the hard thinking has already been done, as an enabler of a new way of working, not a substitute for designing one.

It is slower than digitisation. It is harder to measure. It produces fewer milestone celebrations. But two years later, the organisation actually works differently. Not just faster. Differently.

 

The Uncomfortable Question

If you are sitting with a transformation programme right now, in progress, recently completed, or about to start, ask one question.

What have we changed about how this organisation thinks, decides, and operates? Not what have we deployed. What have we changed?

If the honest answer is “not much,” you have not transformed. You have digitised.

And until someone is willing to say that out loud, the investment in transformation programmes will keep delivering digitisation results, and the question of why the return never arrived will keep going unanswered.

The technology was never the problem. It was always the thinking.

Empathy Is Not a Perk. It Is the Mechanism That Makes Transformation Work

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Fifty-nine percent of CEOs now view empathy as a perk or a nice to have. That figure comes from Businessolver’s 2025 State of Workplace Empathy report, the largest study of its kind, drawing on data from over 26,000 participants across ten years. What makes it striking is not the number itself. It is the direction of travel. That figure is up twelve points in a single year. Executives, as a group, are actively moving away from empathy as a leadership priority, and they are doing so at precisely the moment when the evidence against that position has never been stronger.

This is not an abstract concern about culture or kindness. It is a delivery risk. And it deserves to be treated as one.

 

The Conditions That Produced This Retreat

There is a logic to the shift, even if the conclusion is wrong. The past two years have delivered economic pressure, AI-driven disruption, and a wave of organisational restructuring that has pushed leaders toward harder, more measurable stances. Accountability culture, in many organisations, has become a proxy for toughness. Empathy, by contrast, has been quietly reframed as a luxury, something appropriate for stable times rather than periods of intense change.

The same Businessolver data shows that only 55% of CEOs now say empathy is undervalued in their organisation, down 28 points year-over-year. That is not a marginal shift. That is an entire segment of executive leadership changing its position within twelve months. The message being sent, intentionally or not, is that empathy had its moment and that moment has passed.

The problem is that the evidence says the opposite.

 

What the Data Actually Shows

When 27% of employees view their organisation as unempathetic, they become 1.5 times more likely to leave within six months. Across US organisations, Businessolver estimates that compounds into an annual attrition risk of 180 billion dollars. That is not a culture metric. That is a cost of goods figure that should sit on the CFO’s desk alongside every other delivery risk in a transformation programme.

The same employees in unempathetic organisations report three times higher workplace toxicity and 1.3 times more mental health issues. Those are not soft indicators. Toxic teams do not collaborate. People managing mental health crises do not adopt new systems, embrace new processes, or commit to new ways of working. They survive. And surviving is the opposite of transforming.

The leader who reads these numbers and still concludes that empathy is optional has misread the risk register.

 

Empathy Is Not About Feelings. It Is the Engine of Behaviour Change.

Here is the harder point, and the one that gets lost in the debate. Empathy is not a leadership style choice between being tough and being kind. It is the mechanism through which people change their behaviour. And behaviour change is the only thing that makes transformation real.

Technology does not transform organisations. People do. Systems get deployed, processes get redesigned, roadmaps get approved, and then the actual work of transformation happens in the minds and habits of the people who have to do things differently, every day. That work requires trust. Trust requires people to feel that they are understood, not just managed. And the leader who has stripped empathy from their approach has also, whether they intended to or not, stripped the conditions under which that trust can form.

BCG’s 2025 research on AI transformation makes this explicit. Their finding is that successful AI transformation is 70% people and processes, 10% algorithms, and 20% technology and data. In a programme driven by the most technically sophisticated tools in the history of business, the primary variable is still human. The technology is the smallest part of the challenge. The people transformation that runs alongside it is where programmes are won or lost. That is not a comforting aspiration. That is BCG’s operational conclusion from studying what separates AI transformations that deliver from those that do not.

Against that backdrop, the decision to treat empathy as a perk is not cautious. It is expensive.

 

The False Trade-Off Leaders Keep Making

The framing that puts empathy and accountability in opposition is one of the most persistent and damaging myths in transformation leadership. The assumption is that softer human approaches reduce rigour, that spending time on how people feel comes at the cost of delivery discipline. Executives who have internalised this framing tend to reach for control when things get hard, tightening governance, escalating pressure, increasing reporting frequency, as though the problem is visibility rather than engagement.

It rarely is.

The 70% transformation failure rate, driven by employee resistance and lack of management support, is not a governance failure. It is a people failure that governance cannot fix. You can have every RAG status in the programme green and still be six months from collapse if the people who need to change their behaviour have stopped believing that the organisation cares whether they succeed or fail.

Accountability and empathy are not alternatives. They are complements. The most effective transformation leaders hold both simultaneously. They are direct about what is required. They are also genuinely interested in whether the people doing the work have what they need to deliver it. That combination is not soft. It is operationally serious.

 

Tough Choices Require Human Leadership

Organisations under pressure will face genuinely difficult decisions in the months ahead. Restructuring, reprioritisation, AI adoption at scale. None of that gets easier by removing human connection from the programme. It gets harder, because the people who need to carry the change through are the same people who are watching how the organisation treats them under pressure.

The organisations deprioritising empathy right now are not being tough. They are being wrong about what produces outcomes. And the cost of that mistake will show up, reliably, in the delivery data.

The Leader Who Doesn’t Know They’re Feared

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There is a specific kind of dangerous leader that nobody talks about in boardrooms.

Not the one who shouts. Not the one who publicly humiliates people or rules through naked aggression. That leader is visible. People name them. Organisations deal with them eventually.

The dangerous one is the leader who has created a culture of fear without ever raising their voice. The one whose team has learned, quietly and carefully, that honesty is a liability. The one who genuinely believes they are approachable, open, and trusted, while the people around them have become experts at managing what they say, how they say it, and what they keep entirely to themselves.

This leader does not know they are feared.

And that is exactly what makes them so costly.

 

The Gap Between Who You Think You Are and Who They Experience

Most leaders who create fear do not intend to. That matters, and it also does not matter at all.

Intent does not determine impact. Culture does not care about your intentions. Your team’s behaviour is shaped entirely by what they have learned happens when they take a risk with you, when they bring bad news, push back on a decision, admit a mistake, or say the thing nobody else is saying.

The research on this is striking. Organisational psychologist Tasha Eurich conducted a multi-year study involving thousands of participants across multiple studies and found that while 95% of people believe they are self-aware, only 10 to 15% actually meet the criteria for genuine self-awareness. The finding most relevant here is this: internal self-awareness, how we believe we come across, and external self-awareness, how we actually come across to others, are essentially uncorrelated. A leader can be deeply reflective and still have almost no accurate sense of how they are experienced by their team. This is not an arrogance problem. It is a structural blind spot.

If those moments of honesty have gone badly, even once, even subtly, people remember. They adjust. They start self-censoring before the words leave their mouth. They develop what looks like professionalism but is actually armour.

And from your side of the table, everything looks fine. People are engaged in meetings. Nobody is causing problems. The reports are clean. The team seems to be functioning.

What you are actually seeing is a highly guarded team performing composure.

 

The Behaviours That Build Feared Leaders

None of what follows requires malicious intent. Most of it comes from competence, pressure, or simply the unchecked habits of someone who has always been the fastest, most decisive person in the room. The mechanism is consistent: a behaviour that felt like leadership produced a reaction in others that went unnoticed. And that reaction, over time, became the culture.

You respond to bad news with visible frustration. You do not think it is a big deal. You move on quickly. But the person who delivered that news felt the temperature drop the moment the words left their mouth. They filed it away. Next time, they will soften it. The time after that, they will delay telling you. Eventually, you will be the last to know.

You solve problems before people finish explaining them. You are fast and you are good and your instinct is usually right. But what the other person experiences is that their perspective does not matter. That the conversation is a formality. That you have already decided. So they stop bringing you half-formed problems. They only come when they have the answer, which means you lose access to the problems at the stage when you could actually help.

You confuse directness with dismissal. You believe you give clear, honest feedback. And you do. But there is a difference between feedback that challenges someone’s thinking and feedback that makes them feel their thinking is worthless. The words can be almost identical. The delivery is everything.

You reward the people who agree with you. Not deliberately. But your energy lifts when someone validates your thinking. Your attention sharpens. And the people in that room are excellent at reading energy. They learn the correlation. Agreement gets warmth. Challenge gets friction. The lesson lands fast.

You are always the most certain person in the room. Certainty from a leader is reassuring up to a point. Beyond that point, it signals that doubt is unwelcome. And if doubt is unwelcome, so is the information that generates it. Your team starts protecting you from complexity, which means they start protecting you from reality.

You have never once said: I got that wrong. Or if you have, it was so rare that people remember it. When a leader never admits error, the message to the team is clear: mistakes are not safe here. And a team that cannot make mistakes safely cannot take risks, cannot innovate, and cannot tell you the truth when the truth involves something going wrong.

 

 

What a Guarded Team Looks Like

The tragedy is that guarded teams can look like high-performing teams from a distance.

They are efficient. They deliver. They do not create noise. Meetings run smoothly because nobody says anything that might create friction. Reports look clean because the real information has been edited out. Problems get solved at the level below you because bringing them upward feels more dangerous than managing them quietly.

What you are missing is everything below the surface.

The risk that has been on someone’s mind for three weeks but has not made the register because the person managing it does not want to be seen as struggling. The team member who is six weeks from walking out the door because they have felt invisible for months. The supplier relationship that is quietly deteriorating because your account manager is telling you it is fine rather than managing the conversation you would need to have.

The gap between the reported reality and the lived reality grows, week by week, in proportion to how safe people feel telling you the truth.

And at some point, the gap becomes a crisis. And everyone knew except you.

 

Why the Leaders Who Need This Most Will Not Recognise Themselves

This is the most difficult feature of the whole dynamic.

Research by Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman of leadership development firm Zenger|Folkman, drawing on one of the largest 360-degree feedback databases in existence, consistently finds that senior leaders show the widest gap between how they rate themselves and how their subordinates rate them, particularly on dimensions like listening, approachability, and empathy. The people with the most influence over organisational culture are, on average, the least accurate judges of their own impact on it.

The behaviours that create fear are almost always the same behaviours that made someone successful. The pace. The decisiveness. The high standards. The intolerance for mediocrity. These are not bad qualities. They are, in many environments, exactly what drove results.

But at a certain level of leadership, those same qualities, unchecked and unexamined, become the thing that limits the people around you. And because they drove your success, you do not interrogate them. You double down on them.

And the people around you adapt. They become mirrors. They reflect back what you want to see. You walk into rooms and the room agrees with you. You raise concerns and the concerns get managed. You ask if everything is on track and the answer is always, essentially, yes.

You look successful. The organisation is slowly becoming fragile.

The leaders who most need to hear this will read it and think of someone else. That is not a criticism. It is the nature of the blind spot. You cannot see what the system around you has been carefully constructed to hide from you.

 

The Only Way Through

It starts with an uncomfortable question, not asked of yourself, but asked of someone who will tell you the truth if the environment is safe enough.

What is it like to work with me when things are going wrong?

Not in general. Specifically when things are going wrong. When the pressure is highest. When the news is bad. When someone has made a mistake. What happens in that room?

If you do not know the answer, if you genuinely cannot predict what your team would say, that is the information.

The standard prescription at this point is 360-degree feedback. It can help. But the research on its effectiveness is mixed, and the most common pattern is familiar: leaders receive the results, rationalise the parts that are uncomfortable, and make short-term adjustments that do not hold. The tool is not the problem. The willingness to sit with what it reveals, and to keep sitting with it, is.

Because the leaders who have done the work know exactly how that room feels. They have been told. They have asked enough times, and created enough safety, that people have told them. Not through a survey. Through the kind of environment where someone can walk into your office and say: I need to tell you something you are not going to enjoy hearing.

The ones who have not done the work are always slightly surprised when good people leave. Slightly confused when the programme that looked fine on paper collapsed in execution. Slightly unsure why the energy in the room feels managed rather than genuine.

They are not bad leaders. They are unexamined ones.

And in the long run, the cost is exactly the same.