Advisory · Speaking · Boards
By the time it reaches you, it is no longer true.
Every executive runs on an account of their own organisation that was softened on the way up. Not by dishonesty. By structure.
01 / The mechanism
Hierarchy makes candour expensive.
Reporting a problem early and in full carries a professional risk that softening it does not. Across five layers, the softening compounds in one direction.
The ghost bar behind each row is what the floor knows. The solid bar is what survives the journey upward. Each level removes what is professionally costly to carry.
The account that lands on the top desk is coherent, current and wrong in the places that matter.
The judgement was sound. The picture was not.
02 / Two structures
Every organisation runs two structures at once.
The chart
The room
One is reported. The other decides.
03 / Recognition
Six situations worth 30 minutes.
- Your team agrees in the room and resources something else afterwards.
- You have taken the same structural decision twice, and the tension returned.
- A decision is close to sign-off and something about it is bothering you.
- The person treated as the problem is responding sensibly to an unnamed incentive.
- You are about to restructure, divest or automate on an untested internal account.
- You are new to the seat, and the organisation is your only source on itself.
If none of these describes your week, we have nothing to discuss yet, and I would rather say so now.
Everything on your desk arrived through somebody.
04 / The thinking
Three bodies of work.
The Filter
How an account of an organisation is edited on its way to the top, what the edit removes, and the three channels a leader can build that the hierarchy does not control.
First Generation Leaders
A leader with an inherited network hears the unedited version at dinner. A first-generation leader has one source. The filter is thickest where there is nothing to check it against.
Precisely Wrong
An organisation that filters its own information is now automating the filter. Machine systems do not challenge a premise. They commit to it, at speed.
05 / Speaking
Four talks. Each takes something away from the room.
The Filter
Who edited the account on your desk, and what the edit cost.
Fix the System, Not the Pilot
What aviation learned by refusing human error as an explanation.
The First Generation Leader
Leading where your own experience has not been before.
Precisely Wrong
The governance question a board should settle before approving the next system.
06 / Engage
Three ways to reach me. One firm behind me.
Counsel
Standing access for a principal rather than scheduled sessions. Held to a small number of relationships at a time, because the value is availability.
Boards
Non-executive positions, and work on the distance between governance as written and governance as practised.
FranklySpeaking
Where investigations are run. A bounded 12–16 week examination ending in a documented finding. Separate mandate, separate terms.
07 / Frank
Competence is rarely the constraint. Information is.
I advise chief executives, boards and executive teams on the conditions that stop a sound decision from becoming an executed one.
The method comes from aviation accident investigation: reconstruct what a competent team believed at the moment they acted, then establish which conditions made that belief reasonable.
- Telecommunications
- Energy
- Ports and logistics
- Mining
- Construction
- Financial services
Ask an organisation what is wrong and it will tell you what it has agreed to say is wrong.
08 / Enquire
Bring me the decision you cannot afford to get wrong.
Thirty minutes, direct to me. Its purpose is to establish whether the problem you are describing is the problem you have.
Accepted by direct approach and referral. Speaking, board and advisory enquiries use the same route.