Greg Stevenson describes how his leadership team's confidence in their strategy masked serious problems. He hired an external consultant to present evidence impartially, sequencing facts one by one until the team couldn't deny they needed to change course. The uncomfortable meeting forced a strategic revision before the market made it painful.
Every leadership team I've ever run has been quietly optimistic about its own strategy. That is not a flaw in the people. It's human nature, and it's one of the most dangerous things in the room. I want to tell you about a time I learned to do something about it. I was leading a business, and we had a strategy. We were proud of it. It had spent months to develop and to build, and the leadership team believed in it. On paper, it held together and it was a great strategy. But somewhere underneath, I had a quiet, uncomfortable feeling that we were not seeing the whole picture. That our optimism about the plan was doing some of the work the evidence should have been doing. The problem with a feeling like that is how easy it is to ignore, just put it aside and think, no, this is a fantastic strategy, let's get on with it. Especially when the team is aligned and morale is good and nobody in the room wants to be the one who says, I think we might have it wrong. So I did something deliberate. I decided we were going to engineer an honest collision with reality on purpose before the market did it for us. What I did was I brought in an outside consultant, not to write us a new strategy. I did not need someone else's answer. I needed someone with no investment in our optimism. Someone who could help me lay the evidence out plainly. And then we did the part that actually mattered. We sequenced the data. We did not dump everything on the table at once, where the team could argue with any single piece of it. We ordered it. We built the case the way you build an honest argument. One fact, then the next, then the next, until the picture it added up to could not be looked away from. We made the leadership team collide with reality in a way that left nowhere comfortable to stand. It was not a pleasant meeting. It was an honest collision, rarely are. But it changed the strategy, and it changed it while we still had the time and the room. To change it, rather than later in a crisis with the market making the decision for us. Here is what I took from it. Optimism is not the enemy. You need it to lead. But optimism left unchecked quietly edits your view of reality, and a leadership team will almost never collide with the truth on its own. The comfort of agreement is too strong. So the job of the person at the top is not to wait for that collision. It is to design it. To go and find the honest look deliberately and to sequence the evidence so that the truth lands undeniably before circumstances force it on you later or, or on far worse terms. Anyone can write a strategy. The harder, more senior discipline is engineering the moment your team has to be honest about whether that strategy is still true. The most useful thing I did in that period was not having the right answer. It was being willing to go looking for the one I did not want to hear.
