When institutions stop letting truth travel upward, leaders don’t need to be evil—or even especially incompetent—to look mad. They’re operating inside a system that punishes accuracy and rewards performance.
If you want to understand failure before it gets personalized, watch who gets punished for being right too soon.
Phenomenal framing of how feedback loops determin institutional health way more than individual psychology. The question about who gets punished for being right too soon is the most practical diagnostic tool I've seen for this. I worked at a compnay where people learned to stop flagging problems early because it made you look like you were creating drama, and within two years the whole org was running on fantasy metrics. That line about systems not failing because of one bad person but because feedback stops working should be posted in every boardroom.
Exactly. The moment being early is framed as being “difficult,” the system quietly selects for blindness. People don’t stop seeing problems—they stop saying them. From there, leadership isn’t steering reality anymore, just managing dashboards that reflect what’s safe to report. By the time consequences show up, the feedback loop is already dead.
Most collapse stories start with personality.
This one starts with incentives.
When institutions stop letting truth travel upward, leaders don’t need to be evil—or even especially incompetent—to look mad. They’re operating inside a system that punishes accuracy and rewards performance.
If you want to understand failure before it gets personalized, watch who gets punished for being right too soon.
Phenomenal framing of how feedback loops determin institutional health way more than individual psychology. The question about who gets punished for being right too soon is the most practical diagnostic tool I've seen for this. I worked at a compnay where people learned to stop flagging problems early because it made you look like you were creating drama, and within two years the whole org was running on fantasy metrics. That line about systems not failing because of one bad person but because feedback stops working should be posted in every boardroom.
Exactly. The moment being early is framed as being “difficult,” the system quietly selects for blindness. People don’t stop seeing problems—they stop saying them. From there, leadership isn’t steering reality anymore, just managing dashboards that reflect what’s safe to report. By the time consequences show up, the feedback loop is already dead.