It wasn't broken. It had simply outgrown itself.
"In twenty years of this work, I've never walked into a leadership system where the blind spot was created by bad intentions. It's almost always good intentions — and the assumptions that grew up quietly underneath them."
Rowan didn't come to me because the company was broken. We were having lunch when we started discussing how something just felt unresolved.
The front line knew exactly what to do — the customers made that clear every day. The vision from the top was sharp. But in the middle, things felt different. There simply wasn't enough time in the day to know everything happening anymore.
And nobody was saying it out loud. Sure, there were complaints — personal conflicts, the flicker of fluorescent lights. From Rowan's perspective, everything else seemed fine: the customers were happy, the culture was good, the team respected leadership. What they couldn't see was the shape of what was coming through that open door. The strategic questions weren't making it to the top.
"Being needed and being valuable are easy to confuse when you built the system yourself."
The diagnostic didn't reveal a broken company. It revealed a company that had outgrown the informal architecture that got it there. To scale, the middle needed:
- Defined Lanes: Explicit permission to make decisions and own the outcomes.
- Rhythmic Accountability: Meetings that created alignment without feeling like surveillance.
- Strategic Momentum: A clear picture of what success looked like at their level.
Within a year, the leadership team was moving without waiting for a signal. Rowan was finally doing the work that only a CEO can do — a shorter list than assumed, and a far more interesting one.
What assumption about your organization has never been tested from the outside?