Making Reality Visible Wasn’t Enough

When a failed organizational intervention and the stubborn human brain culminated in a different way of thinking about change

Recently, I had the opportunity to discover that I was wrong. And as the Dowager Countess from Downton Abbey, I wasn’t really familiar with the sensation. So it needed some proper rumination.

My error wasn’t simply that an intervention didn’t go according to plan. Shit happens. What actually happened was that reality exposed a brutal flaw in one of my underlying assumptions about how change happens inside organizations. And that was rather a blow after a decade of doing this for a living.

So get some popcorn and imagine this:

BEFORE ANYTHING HAPPENED: I WAS VERY CONFIDENT

An organization reached out to me after reading this blog and asked me to deliver a keynote to more than 100 leaders on the topic of ownership. I was somewhat puzzled, and my first question was: “Are you sure you’ve read my blog?” If there is one thing this blog is not known for, it is making people comfortable. They said that’s exactly why they called me.

Before agreeing, I asked to meet with the executive leadership. It was quickly set up, and I explained something I have come to believe quite strongly over the years: ownership is not a personality trait that can simply be trained into people. It is a behavioral response to the conditions created by a system.

If you want more ownership, don’t start by asking people to “be more accountable.” Start by asking what makes accountability the rational choice. I emphasized the importance of them being an active part of the follow-up we agreed to post-keynote. They nodded along and said, “Finally, something makes sense.” I thought, “Sweet! We can do some real work!” And I was pumped.

We agreed that instead of giving a motivational talk, we’d use the opportunity to diagnose the conditions that make ownership possible. I built the keynote around three prerequisites:

Safety. Clarity. Autonomy. Taking them in the sense of observable conditions.

THE EVIDENCE STARTS BEING INCONVENIENT

The first half of the keynote became a live diagnostic.

Before talking about safety, I asked everyone to raise their hand if, in the past three months, they had noticed a problem early. Almost every hand went up.

Then I asked them to keep their hand raised if they had acted on it immediately. A significant number of hands went down.

Finally, I asked whether they believed it would be equally safe for everyone in the room to raise a difficult issue. Only a handful of hands remained.

We repeated similar exercises for clarity and autonomy. The patterns were remarkably consistent.

Leaders signaled shifting priorities without context. Uncertainty about decision rights became visible. Even the factory director raised a hand alongside everyone else when I asked them to raise their hands if they were held accountable for outcomes without the authority to control the levers.

There was very little denial in the room. If anything, there was recognition.

At the end of the keynote, I asked for anonymous submissions about what gets in the way of ownership. When it was done, I remember thinking: “This is a solid foundation. We finally have something real to work with.” I left hyped.

AND HERE IS WHERE IT GOES TO SH*T

Over the following weeks, something weird happened. The organization didn’t reject the findings.

It simply moved away from them. Executive leaders gradually disengaged from the follow-up. Participation was delegated downward. The proposed workshop became increasingly focused on documentation rather than dialogue. At the same time, the business entered a period of significant market pressure.

Eventually, we agreed to stop the collaboration.

I walked away relieved. And deeply puzzled.

Because I couldn’t reconcile two observations.

The organization had seen itself remarkably clearly. And yet, seeing itself changed almost nothing. Actually, seeing itself and then witnessing senior leadership disappear possibly created more damage than I had anticipated. Asking people to make reality visible creates an implicit promise that reality will matter. If the organization then does nothing with it, observability itself can reinforce learned futility. Their disappearance only created a new lesson: “See? Even when we say it out loud, nothing changes.”

6 MONTHS OF CHEWING LATER:

For a while, I interpreted this as a mismatch, bad timing or resistance. But after ruminating over this experience enough (this happened over 6 months ago… just to give you a picture of rumination at this scale), I arrived to a different conclusion.

I think I had assumed something that simply isn’t true. I assumed that making reality not only visible, but describable and understandable, would create the conditions for change to follow.

Apparently, it doesn’t. At least not by itself.

ENTER: THE ANNOYINGLY PREDICTIVE HUMAN BRAIN

The realization that followed, though, keeps fascinating me.

Here goes: Behavior change may require imagination before it requires willpower. And by imagination, I don’t mean visualization. I mean having enough lived evidence for your brain to consider a different outcome genuinely possible.

Think about it.

Imagine spending years in an environment where raising problems is unpredictable. Sometimes you are thanked. Sometimes ignored. Sometimes blamed. Sometimes subtly punished.

What does your brain learn?

It learns a prediction.

“If I speak up, it might cost me.”

That prediction becomes adaptive. Your brain continuously uses previous experience to anticipate what is likely to happen next, and eventually you don’t need to consciously contemplate the decision. You simply avoid what experience has taught you might cost you. And that is a lesson you will not unlearn just because somebody announces that ownership is important and says that now we will look at why it cannot emerge.

It takes time for repeated experience to give the learned prediction serious competition. Knowing intellectually that things are supposed to be different doesn’t make the old prediction disappear. Until you have a believable, lived alternative in which raising problems is predictably safe, previous experience remains the stronger predictor. Self-preservation, after all, is not an optional feature that can be turned off because someone suddenly broadcasted that accountability is trending from tomorrow.

This line of thought completely changed how I think about leadership. Perhaps leadership isn’t primarily about influencing behavior. Perhaps it is about changing what people can expect. In neuroscience, the mismatch between what we predict and what actually happens is called a prediction error, so:

Every time someone expects punishment and receives curiosity instead: prediction error.

Every time someone expects blame and receives shared problem solving: prediction error.

Every time someone expects stress and encounters understanding: prediction error.

One prediction error changes very little.

However, repeated, consistent prediction errors begin to rewrite expectations. And when they do, behavior has a way to change. So maybe this is an additional layer to what culture actually is: shared predictions about possible outcomes. Or, so to speak: What happens around here?

I’ve written before that culture is behavior that makes sense within a system. Maybe this sits one layer underneath it: culture is also the shared set of predictions that makes that behavior make sense.

What happens here when I disagree, when I fail, when the boss is wrong, when the deadline becomes impossible, when I tell the truth?

WELL, SH*T. NOW WHAT?

I don’t have a satisfying ending to this story. In fact, this article ends with more questions than answers. I actually feel like none of this is news under the sun. And yet somehow this line of thinking never entered boardrooms or the conventional literature of my work. And I have a hunch that this is a far more interesting area to explore than “why visibility of reality is not enough.”

If ownership is an emergent property of predictable conditions, if making reality visible is insufficient, if people behave according to the futures they can imagine…

Then perhaps the real work of leadership is much less about changing people than about making a different future believable.

I don’t yet know how to do that consistently. But I am increasingly convinced that before asking why people won’t change, we should ask a much more enlightening question:

Based on everything they have experienced here, was it possible for them to expect anything different?