Monthly Archives: September 2026

Patience Is Not Passive. It Is the Hardest Active Choice Most People Never Make

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Patience gets treated as the absence of action: the thing you’re doing while you wait for something else to happen. The clearest evidence says that’s backwards, not from child-development research, but from what happens when trained professionals are given a straight choice between waiting and acting. Patience is usually the harder, more active choice, and impulsive action is often the easier one dressed up as decisiveness.

 

Retiring the Marshmallow Test

Any conversation about patience eventually reaches for the marshmallow test, the classic finding that children who delayed eating one marshmallow to get two later did better in life. A 2024 replication study in Child Development, using far larger and more representative data than the original, found the test doesn’t reliably predict adult outcomes at all: nearly every regression-adjusted relationship between childhood marshmallow performance and adult achievement, health, or behaviour came back statistically insignificant. The honest version of patience research doesn’t lean on a famous but shaky finding about children. It looks at what patience actually costs adults making real decisions.

 

The Bias That Makes Patience Feel Wrong

Behavioural economists have a name for the instinct patience has to fight: action bias, the tendency to act even when the evidence says waiting is the better choice, because acting feels like doing the job and waiting feels like doing nothing. A widely cited study of professional goalkeepers facing 286 penalty kicks found this bias in its purest form: goalkeepers dive left or right the overwhelming majority of the time, even though staying in the centre of the goal is statistically the better strategy, since kicks go there roughly 29% of the time. Goalkeepers dive anyway, because conceding a goal while standing still feels worse, and looks worse, than conceding one while visibly trying.

Medical research on “intervention bias” finds the identical mechanism in physicians: doctors reliably feel more satisfied recommending a treatment than recommending watchful waiting, “giving a sense of greater activism in their patients’ care,” even when the evidence supports doing nothing. Neither of these is really about competence. Both are about how much easier it feels to have visibly acted, regardless of whether acting was actually correct.

 

What Patient Leadership Actually Looks Like

A qualitative study of leaders who are known for patience found something specific underneath the trait: patience functions as a decision-making framework in its own right, not an absence of one, guiding a distinct process for weighing a situation before committing to act on it. A separate survey of 578 working professionals found leaders rated as more patient saw their teams’ self-reported creativity and collaboration rise by an average of 16%, and productivity by 13%.

A six-year study of more than 20 pairs of executives working in genuinely volatile markets coined the useful term for what this looks like in practice: active waiting. Not paralysis, and not indecision. Deliberate preparation during a lull, so that when a real opportunity actually opens, the leader can act decisively rather than reactively.

 

Why the Harder Choice Rarely Gets Made

None of the research above suggests patience is passivity’s better name. It suggests the opposite: patience requires resisting a bias that’s actively working against it in the moment, on a soccer pitch, in an exam room, or in a boardroom under pressure to be seen doing something. The impulsive decision is usually the one that requires less discipline, not more, because it removes the discomfort of visibly not acting while everyone is watching.

 

The Actual Choice Worth Making

The next time waiting is the objectively better move and doing something still feels necessary, the honest question isn’t whether patience is the right call. The research says it usually is. The question is whether you can tolerate looking like you’re doing nothing for exactly as long as doing nothing is correct.

Governance Fatigue Is Real, and It’s Killing the Governance That Matters

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Every governance failure gets the same response: add a committee. Nobody ever asks which of the five committees already in the room should be deleted.

I have watched this play out on the same programme, twice, thirteen months apart. An incident happens. A review is commissioned. The review recommends a new gate, a new sign-off, a new board with a name that sounds important. Nobody asks whether the five existing boards had already covered this ground and simply were not being used properly. The new layer gets built. The old layers stay exactly where they were, because retiring a control is a much harder conversation than adding one, and nobody wants to be the person who removed the safeguard right before something went wrong.

Multiply that pattern across a few years of incidents, mergers, audits and regulatory nudges, and you get an organisation with more governance than anyone can actually operate.

 

The sprawl nobody planned and everybody built

Governance frameworks get bloated one reasonable-sounding addition at a time, not in a single decision. A near-miss produces a new checkpoint. An audit finding produces a new form. A departing executive leaves behind a committee that made sense under their sponsorship and none under anyone else’s. Each addition was defensible in isolation. Nobody ever sat down and asked what the whole structure looked like once you added them all together.

The organisations most proud of their governance maturity are often the ones carrying the heaviest version of this problem. More boards. More gates. More documented sign-offs. It reads as rigour on an org chart and feels like wading through treacle to anyone actually trying to get something delivered.

 

Fatigue looks like silence, not rebellion

The expensive part is what people do once the meetings stop making sense to them, not the extra meetings. They do not object. They do not escalate the absurdity of an ninth sign-off. They quietly learn which boxes can be ticked without real scrutiny, which approvals are theatre, and which route gets something through fastest regardless of whether it is the correct one.

That is governance fatigue, and it is far more dangerous than having too little governance in the first place. An organisation with no controls at least knows it is exposed. An organisation with too many controls believes it is protected, right up until the one decision that actually mattered slipped through a gate everyone had stopped taking seriously.

 

Clarity beats volume, every time

The research on decision rights backs this up more directly than most governance debates acknowledge. Itonics’s analysis of partner and programme governance found that organisations using a properly maintained RACI framework report 70 per cent fewer “who decides” disputes and 25 per cent faster decision cycle times. RACI works by replacing ambiguity with a single, shared answer to a question that used to require a meeting to resolve, not by adding another layer. The gain comes from governance that is unambiguous enough that people stop needing to ask, rather than from adding more of it.

That is the distinction most organisations miss when they respond to a failure by adding structure. The problem was usually oversight so diffuse that nobody could say, without checking three separate documents, who actually held the decision.

 

The discipline of taking something away

Fixing this requires a habit most organisations have never built: retiring governance on purpose. Every new control should come with an audit of what it is replacing, not just what it is adding. Every steering board should have to justify its existence against a simple test: if this group disappeared tomorrow, what decision would genuinely not get made anywhere else? If the answer is “nothing, it would just move up a level,” that board is inertia with a calendar invite, not governance.

The organisations that manage this well treat their governance structure the way a good engineer treats a system under load, asking what is carrying weight it no longer needs to carry and taking it out, rather than just adding capacity when something breaks.

Governance was never supposed to be heavy. It was supposed to be clear. Somewhere along the way, most organisations mistook the two for the same thing.

 

What We Found When We Measured Adoption, Not Just Deployment.

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A go live report is easy to write. Every site is on the new system, every licence is issued, every training session delivered on schedule. Three months later, the usage dashboard tells a different story, and it is the dashboard nobody puts in front of the steering committee.

 

The Metric Everyone Reports

Deployment is countable in a way adoption never is. Percentage of sites migrated, number of licences activated, hours of training delivered, these are the figures that go into a programme status report because they can be measured on the day the rollout finishes. None of them says whether anyone is still using the system a quarter later, or whether they have quietly gone back to the spreadsheet it was meant to replace.

 

The Number Nobody Puts in the Steering Deck

IBM’s 2026 Global CEO Study, based on more than 2,000 chief executives surveyed worldwide by the IBM Institute for Business Value, found that only 25 per cent of workers use AI regularly in their jobs, even though 86 per cent of CEOs believe their workforce already has the skills to do so. Eighty three per cent of the same CEOs said AI’s success depends more on people’s adoption than on the technology itself. The rollout finished on schedule. The adoption did not follow.

 

What Poor Adoption Actually Costs

A Forrester Consulting study commissioned by Whatfix, surveying 335 senior decision makers at large organisations across North America, Europe, APAC and India, put a figure on what that gap costs a mid-sized enterprise, $10.9 million a year, plus 728 hours lost per employee navigating systems that were rolled out but never properly embedded. That is not a training budget line. It is the ongoing cost of a deployment nobody followed up on. The same research found a wide gap between organisations with adoption maturity and those without, 53 per cent of mature adopters reported improved user experience against 28 per cent of the rest, and 56 per cent reported stronger return on investment against 28 per cent.

 

Why Deployment Metrics Miss This

Programme reporting is built around milestones a PMO can close off: go live achieved, training complete, licences distributed. Adoption behaves more like a curve than a milestone, one that keeps moving long after the project has been marked complete and the team has moved on to the next initiative. By the time low usage shows up in a satisfaction survey or a renewal conversation, the people who owned the rollout are three programmes further down the roadmap.

Part of the reason adoption rarely gets measured is that almost nothing in a typical programme is set up to reward it. Vendor contracts are frequently structured around go live milestones rather than usage thresholds, so the commercial incentive to keep measuring stops the day the system switches on. Programme teams are resourced to deliver a rollout, not to own what happens to it afterwards, and by the time adoption data would be available, the team has usually been reallocated to the next initiative. None of this is deliberate. It simply reflects a reporting structure and an ownership structure that both end at the same milestone.

 

What We Started Measuring Instead

On some programmes I have run, the fix had less to do with better software and more to do with what the steering committee agreed to look at. We started tracking active usage at 30, 60 and 90 days after go live, alongside a simple drop off rate, how many people who logged in during week one had stopped logging in by week twelve. We also moved benefits realisation sign off away from the go live date and tied it to a usage threshold instead, so a project could not be closed as successful until people were actually using what had been built. It is a small governance change, and it surfaces problems a deployment report never will.

Rollout dates and licence counts still matter, deployment discipline was never the issue. What most programmes are missing is a second dashboard sitting next to the first one, what deployment made possible, and what adoption is showing three months after anyone stopped watching. The programmes that quietly fail are rarely the ones that missed a go live date. They are the ones that hit it, reported it as a win, and never checked what happened next.

Your Reputation Travels Faster Than You Do. Act Accordingly.

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Most executives manage their reputation like a local matter: how you’re seen in this room, on this team, in this market. That’s the wrong frame. Reputation moves through networks faster and further than any individual career move, and it arrives in the next room before you do.

 

The Research Behind Why Word Travels

A 2022 study in Science, based on five years of randomised experiments across 20 million LinkedIn users, 2 billion new connections, and 70 million job applications, found that professional information travels most efficiently through weak ties, not close friends. The loose, wide network of people who know you a little, rather than the small circle who know you well, is what actually carries information about you into rooms you haven’t entered yet.

That mechanism cuts both ways. It is exactly how good work gets you noticed somewhere new. It is also exactly how a reputation for cutting corners, mistreating people, or leaving a mess behind you gets there first.

 

What Happens to Reputation That Travels Badly

The clearest, most rigorously measured evidence of this comes not from executive search literature, which is surprisingly thin on hard numbers, but from corporate governance research on company directors. A 2005 study in the Journal of Accounting Research tracked 409 US firms that restated their earnings between 1997 and 2001. Directors of those firms lost roughly a quarter of their positions on other, unrelated companies’ boards afterward, not just the one where the restatement happened. A related 2007 study in the Journal of Financial Economics found that outside directors named in shareholder fraud lawsuits saw a measurable decline in how many other directorships they held, even at companies with no connection to the original case, at an estimated cost of roughly $1 million per lost seat.

That is reputation travelling, quantified: conduct in one boardroom measurably closing doors in boardrooms that had nothing to do with it.

 

Real Cases, Not Hypotheticals

Steve Wynn resigned from Wynn Resorts in 2018 following sexual misconduct allegations. The consequences did not stay in Nevada. Massachusetts gaming regulators, investigating a market he had never previously operated in, fined the company $35 million and forced it to strip his name from its brand-new $2.6 billion property before it opened, renaming Wynn Boston Harbor to Encore Boston Harbor specifically to distance the business from him. He personally paid $10 million in 2023 to permanently exit the Nevada gaming industry. A reputation formed in one state travelled into a state where he had never done business, and shaped how a market he’d never worked in treated him before he arrived.

Travis Kalanick’s departure from Uber followed him into an entirely new, unrelated venture years later. Coverage of his food-delivery startup CloudKitchens traces his Uber exit “amid a firestorm of privacy concerns, allegations of widespread sexual harassment and gender discrimination,” then quotes a former CloudKitchens executive calling it “the most toxic place I’ve ever seen or experienced,” and an operator who said the company “tried to destroy” the brand he had built there. The new business was never assessed purely on its own merits. It was read through the lens of the one he had just left.

Not every case ends the same way. Andreessen Horowitz invested $350 million in Adam Neumann’s new venture Flow in 2022, valuing it above $1 billion before it had launched, despite WeWork’s collapse from a $47 billion to an $8 billion valuation under his leadership. Marc Andreessen’s public justification leaned on second chances: “we love seeing repeat-founders build on past successes by growing from lessons learned.” Reputation still shaped every headline, every term, and every question asked about the deal, even though it never blocked the capital.

 

Acting Accordingly

One caveat is worth stating directly: nobody has produced a clean statistic for how much weight boards or recruiters place on informal, back-channel reputation versus formal references. That data mostly doesn’t exist, and anyone who claims otherwise is making it up. The mechanism, though, is well documented: wide, weak professional networks carry information fast, and reputational damage in one role measurably reduces opportunity in entirely unrelated ones.

The practical implication isn’t paranoia. It’s that the version of you that shows up in a room you’ve never been in was written by people you may not remember meeting, months or years before you walked in. Act like the story is already there, because it usually is.