A CEO of a mid-sized industrial company came to us six months into a major strategic reorientation. He had the data. He had the team. He had the board’s confidence. The direction was clear.
He was not asking for help navigating uncertainty. He was asking us to confirm he was on the right track.
That is a different conversation.
What we observed, carefully and over time, was a leader operating on a map drawn from the past. The data was real. The conclusions he drew from it were not. The market had shifted in ways his mental model had not yet registered. His certainty was not a sign of clarity. It was a symptom.
In our experience, the most exposed leaders are rarely the ones who say they don’t know. They are the ones who stopped asking.
At the top of an organization, you are almost always operating in conditions of genuine darkness. Not because information is missing, though it often is, but because the complexity of the system exceeds what any data set can fully capture. The leader who believes otherwise is not walking in daylight. They are hallucinating it.
That is where the real work begins.
This is part of our series: In the dark. On purpose. To be continued…