28/08/2026
Nothing triggers chaos more colorfully than failed plans, missed targets and frustrated strategies.
“We dropped the ball.” (You were in the wrong court dude, in the first place.)
“We were not on the same page.” (You were on the same page of different books.)
“We didn’t read the writings on the wall.” (What? They were not subtle writings, they were as big as vandalisms!)
After the fact, it’s easy to consign learnings to root-cause analysis. The search for gaps and loopholes and misgivings that almost inevitably dovetails to the search for culprits. Aha, it’s you!
We’re seeing AI speed up the planning process. But we’re not seeing AI translating lethal strategies into deadly effective outcomes.
Yup, that’s still on us.
The reality that’s common, from my ten cents? The misses most people are used to analyzing are not the ones enabled by wide blindsides. It’s uncommon that there is enough executive courage to look into failures driven by tangential or opposing directions, where one’s heading northeast while everyone’s assuming they’re heading southwest. Someone didn't read the compass correctly.
And the thing is - such huge, monumnetal misses are caused by typical gaps. They are sadly driven quite too often by leadership hubris and thinking process deficits.
Executives deciding to defer the hiring of a critical department leader because the current team could still wing it. Leaders went DIY on the complex integration work right after the merger because they thought it can be handled by three managers who had gone through M&A integrations before as impacted participants a few years ago in their respective careers.
The real danger is that these mistakes take time to become visible. So in the meantime, such DIY effort might even be awarded as a cost-saving effort in next week’s Town Hall Meeting.
Hunger for difficult conversations helps. A genuine desire to understand what you’re missing helps - devoid of filters that protect egos more than it protects the enterprise.
Better late than very late.
