When You See the Problem Before the Organisation Does
- Priya Venkatesan
- 12 minutes ago
- 2 min read
You see it coming before anyone else.
the market shift
the talent drain
The strategy that's about to take a hit
the cracks in culture that will show up in 6 months.
You've raised it multiple times. The room nodded and moved on.
A senior leader I worked with had seen it coming for over a year.
The signals were everywhere.
She raised it more than once. The response was polite interest and no action.
When we finally spoke, the shift had already hit. The organisation was scrambling.
I saw it coming. But by the time I could move my organisational elephant, it was too late.
She was tired of being right and unheard.
She's not alone.
At senior levels, your job is to see around corners. You're connecting dots across teams, functions & markets. But visibility without collective action creates frustration.
Your dilemma is whether to push hard or stay quiet.
If you push too hard you become the person who always sees problems.
If you stay quiet, you watch the damage unfold and carry the weight of knowing.
Neither option feels completely right.
Rita McGrath's book Seeing Around Corners names talks about this dilemma in a useful way by calling it 'period of optimum warning.'
Early on, signals are weak but you have maximum freedom to act. By the time the problem is obvious to everyone, the information is clear but the options have shrunk.
A leader's decision is to know when to 'warn' in a way the organisation still has options to act on it. Also to communicate in a way that it gets quorum.
When you see the problem before the organisation does, here are some actions that ease the tension between Activism and Passivism:
Connect it to the strategic priority of the organisation
With the kind of noise we receive everyday, its important to isolate the signal in a way that the organisational leaders see how its related to the most important thing for the organisation at that point in time.
Pick a Cadence
The number of times the message needs to be articulated is the function of number of
stakeholders and the number of repetitions required to grab their attention
Make invisible visible
Not all leaders make intuitive decisions. Some want data. Make the invisible visible with as much structure and data you can get.
Magnify cost of inaction
Most people move away from the things that they do not want. Magnifying it would bestow 'urgency'.
Define exit criteria
Decide for yourself when you want to stop when no one listens. Give your self permission to
fail.
What are you seeing that the organisation isn't ready to hear?
