I go into organizations knowing something isn’t working. That’s why I’m there.
What I don’t know is what.
So, I assume the best of the executive team. I work to pull out the best in each of them, because if we can get there, they’ll innovate their way forward. Then we apply load. We put them under pressure to deliver something real, and we watch what emerges.
Something always comes out and it’s never the same thing twice.
With this Founder/CEO, what came out was an executive team that was over capacity and crumbled.
They thought they had the right people and the right processes to scale to a national level. But when we tested it earlier this year. They didn’t hold.
Their first instinct was to scrap the team and start over. That instinct wasn’t wrong about the facts. The team did fail. They failed in front of them, on something that mattered.
But the failure was the indicator, not the root cause. What surfaced under load were leadership gaps in the CEO and systems gaps in the organization. The way they had been operating had stopped working, and nobody could see it until they were asked to do something the old way couldn’t do.
The ground was moving under the organization. A major supply chain disruption was hitting their distribution model. A competitor was siphoning off a key customer segment of an ecosystem they had built. Financially they were thin enough that they could barely deliver on what they had already promised and couldn’t take on new business.
The handwriting was on the wall. On that trajectory they had about a year.
We started the identity work. Stripping the organization down to its core.
In this process, the mental models must go first. How the executive team thinks, decides, trusts, takes ownership and interacts with each other. That part is hard, but it’s survivable, because it’s still abstract. You can agree to change how you think and not have it cost you anything yet.
Then we got to the signature program. The one that had anchored their success. The initial mental model work is what made it touchable at all, because as long as the old thinking was intact, that program was never going to be on the table.
That’s when the second wave came up. Ego. Self-protection. Fear. Defensiveness that hadn’t shown up to this extent in the earlier work, because now it was attached to something they had built and could point at.
I was digging into the details of the core program when it broke open. “You’re adding too much complexity and you are taking us backwards. This is a place we don’t want to go.”
It was a tense conversation. When it ended I wasn’t sure how they were going to respond.
I couldn’t reduce the complexity. The complexity was real and it wasn’t going anywhere. But I could re-sequenced it, so we took it a piece at a time instead of all at once.
It took us the better part of three weeks to finish dismantling everything and they described it as being in the dark and not being able to see their way through.
Airplane pilots train for something called spatial disorientation. It happens at night, or in a dense cloud or fog bank, any time you lose the horizon. Without a visible reference, your inner ear starts inventing one. You feel level in a slow turn. You feel like you’re climbing while the altimeter shows you are losing altitude. The problem is the feeling doesn’t feel like a guess it feels like a deep knowing. Like the kind of knowing that has served them well all their life. Pilots have to be trained to disregard their own bodies, because the ones who trust the feeling will fly a working aircraft into the ground and take everyone on board with them.
That’s the dark. You have removed every reference point an executive team has been navigating by, and their instincts do not go quiet. Their instincts get louder. They are least reliable at exactly the moment they are most insistent.
The only thing left to fly on is instruments.
We kept working from the identity core. That’s the piece we didn’t dismantle. It’s the one reference point we don’t remove.
From an operational standpoint, what the stripping does is make a team pliable. Not compliant, just pliable. The ego is out. The fear is out. The assumptions about how things have to work are out.
Before, there was not enough psychological safety in that room for them to have the transparent conversations that were needed. Which meant the only fact anyone could see about the competitor was market share leaving. They were defending the segment like it was being stolen. Hanging on because letting go felt like losing.
From the identity core, they could see something else. The better strategic move was to turn the competitor into a stakeholder. That segment had been eating delivery hours and capital they were not recouping.
The released capital is going against bad debt they had been carrying. The hours are going back to their core clients. The freed capacity has put new markets in reach, when six months ago they couldn’t take on any new business.
The data had been sitting in front of them the whole time. But what they were missing was a room where those numbers could be looked at without something in it needing to be protected.
That is what is on the other side of letting go. A group of people who can finally think creatively and collaboratively about what might be possible, because nothing in the room is defending itself anymore.