Nobody designed this

That matters more than it sounds, and it's why I am writing a book rather than a diagnosis.

Companies usually don't get the chance to design how they run. There is always something more urgent than a conversation about a framework, a process, or a new way of organising yourself, so these conversations are the ones that always lose, because nothing breaks the week you skip them.

So the way of working becomes whatever survived. Not the best version. The version nobody got round to changing.

And a system nobody chose is a system nobody feels responsible for. Which is why asking a leadership team what is wrong with how they run produces such careful answers. They aren't defending it. They have never thought of it as theirs.

The part that changed how I work

For a long time, I treated the problems I was brought in to solve as people problems. They arrive described that way. My team aren't ambitious enough. Nobody tells me bad news early. Nobody finishes anything.

Those are all behaviours. And a behaviour isn't a character trait. It's what somebody does because of what they feel, and what they feel comes from what they have watched happen.

Take the first one, because I hear it more than any other.

To set an easily achievable goal on purpose, what would somebody have to be feeling? Probably that reaching and missing costs them something, and that comfortably hitting a modest number is the safer trade.

And where would they learn that? From a previous job, perhaps. Or, in a review, the team that missed an ambitious goal had a harder time than the team that hit a small one. Or, from the stretch target that arrived with no extra resources.

Here is what surprises leaders most, and it surprised me. Often, what people believe isn't even true. Nobody was punished for missing. But one person thought they were, told two people, and it became a fact everybody acts on, and nobody says out loud.

Which means encouragement won't fix it. There is no talking somebody out of what they watched.

Why is this good news?

A people problem is heavy. It implies hiring, or personalities, or a culture that needs years of work.

A design problem is different. You can change a design on any day of any week.

If the reason a team is cautious is that they watched caution get rewarded, then what happens next time is the intervention. Not a workshop. What actually happens to the next team that misses something ambitious, and whether anybody notices it out loud.

That is a smaller job than fixing people. It's also the job nobody is doing because it doesn't look like work. It looks like paying attention.

What is this book?

Six things.

Two or three choices the company is genuinely resourcing. The measures that would change a decision. Goals as outcomes, with real people's time attached. One weekly rhythm that ends in a decision. Recognition that gets designed rather than improvised. And a memory, so the next person inherits what this one learned.

Most of it will feel obvious as you read it, which is good. The difficulty is never understanding these six things. It's that installing them means changing meetings that already exist and habits that already work well enough.

That is what the last part of the book is about.

I should also say, early, what I think will actually happen if you do this. Not faster reporting or tidier planning, although both come.

I think you will find out that your team was better than your system let them be. That has been the most common outcome I have seen, and it's consistently the one nobody expects.