TBM 296: Trust Lets You Observe Reality - by John Cutler
Somewhere in your organization, you have a completely well-meaning, qualified, empathetic executive—maybe the CEO, perhaps the CFO, someone—screaming (quietly) to themselves, "What the hell is going on?"
It's obvious something is wrong—to everyone—but no one can seem to give them a straight answer on what it is (though everyone has a multitude of theories). And when that executive asks for someone, anyone, to take some sort of accountability for the state of things, they get bombarded with self-serving theories and hand-waving.
The more dysfunction in the environment, the harder it is to understand what's going on. The more dysfunctional the environment gets and the more pressure there is to understand what's going on, the more likely it is that the approaches to understanding what's going on will be inadequate and flawed and may even make the situation worse. It is a wicked loop.
Note: By "dysfunction" here, I literally mean the proportion of things not functioning or inhibited from functioning. Sometimes, the dysfunction is overt—low psychological safety and toxic people—but more often than not, it is the accumulation of many smaller things clogging up feedback channels, observability, motivation, etc.
