Feb25
Most leaders I sit with are not careless.
They are thoughtful. Informed. Responsible. Wonderful. Caring
They read. They scan. They hire smart people. They invest in technology. They commission strategy work.
And yet.
The things keeping them awake at night are often the wrong things.
Markets.
Competitors.
Interest rates.
The next big tech wave.
AI everything
All real. All visible.
But the bigger risks right now are quieter.
And that’s why they’re more dangerous.
This one is creeping up slowly.
More systems. More dashboards. More automation. More AI assisting with choices.
None of that is the issue.
The issue is this:
If someone asked you, calmly and directly, “Why was that decision made?” could you walk them through it in plain language?
Not technically.
Not defensively.
Plainly.
When decisions start to move faster than understanding, something shifts.
At first it feels efficient.
Later it feels fragile.
And once you cannot explain a decision, you cannot properly stand behind it.
That’s not a technology problem.
That’s a leadership problem.
Most strategies are built on assumptions.
About customers.
About talent.
About regulation.
About how fast things will change.
But here’s what I’m noticing.
Leaders review performance quarterly.
They review budgets annually.
They review talent constantly.
Very few revisit the assumptions underneath their strategy.
Not because they’re lazy.
Because everything looks fine.
Until it doesn’t.
By the time an assumption visibly breaks, it’s already been drifting for months, sometimes years.
That drift is subtle. It doesn’t announce itself.
It just quietly pulls your plan slightly out of alignment.
And small misalignments compound.
Everyone wants efficiency.
Lean teams. Faster processes. Automated flows. Cleaner systems.
And optimisation works.
Until it doesn’t.
When you optimise everything, you remove slack.
Slack is the extra thinking time.
The extra capacity.
The extra human judgement.
Slack is also resilience.
The organisations that look the most impressive on paper are sometimes the least adaptable when something unexpected hits.
Because there’s no room left to absorb it.
No room to think.
No room to pause.
Efficiency is visible.
Resilience is not.
That’s why leaders chase one and forget the other.
Trust rarely collapses overnight.
It thins.
It stretches.
It starts to feel slightly transactional instead of relational.
You can feel this in teams long before it shows up in data.
But it’s easy to dismiss because nothing dramatic has happened.
No scandal.
No crisis.
No headline.
Just a slow shift in tone.
If people don’t fully understand how decisions are being made, they start filling in the blanks themselves.
And humans are very good at filling in blanks with suspicion.
By the time leaders notice trust erosion, it has already been happening quietly.
This one is uncomfortable.
Not because automation is wrong.
But because it’s subtle.
Every time we automate something, we’re making a choice about where human judgement is no longer required.
Sometimes that’s exactly right.
Sometimes it’s premature.
Sometimes it’s invisible.
Work is no longer just jobs and roles. It’s a series of decisions and tasks shared between humans, machines, and AI.
If you don’t deliberately design that balance, it gets designed for you.
And once human judgement disappears from certain parts of the system, it’s surprisingly hard to put back.
Not whether AI is coming.
It’s already here.
Not whether disruption will continue.
It will.
The deeper question is:
Where are we slowly losing visibility over our own decision-making?
Where have we stopped questioning the assumptions that got us here?
Where are we optimising without asking what we might be weakening?
Those are harder questions.
They don’t fit neatly into a dashboard.
They don’t get solved with a new tool.
They require space to think.
And thinking space is becoming rare.
I’ve found something interesting over the years.
The leaders who navigate this well don’t necessarily know more.
They ask better questions, earlier.
They’re willing to sit with discomfort before it becomes crisis.
They’re open to having someone in the room whose role is not to predict the future, but to help them see what they’re currently missing.
That’s not dramatic work.
It’s disciplined work.
It’s patient work.
But it changes the quality of decisions in ways that compound.
Leaders shouldn’t be losing sleep over noise.
They should be paying attention to the quiet shifts inside their own systems.
Because the future rarely breaks organisations suddenly.
It exposes what they stopped noticing.
You can’t predict tomorrow.
But you can prepare for it.
Choose Forward.
By Morris Misel
Keywords: Business Strategy, Leadership, Risk Management
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