Absolute power disrupts absolutely.
And none of us are immune.
While the reality of the situation is bound to shift over the coming hours or days, at the time of writing, the Strait of Hormuz is open following an announcement from Iran today.
After weeks of conflict, countless lives lost, and billions of dollars spent, the world seems—at least for now—right back where it started.
Just worse off.
And what’s striking is how familiar the pattern looks.
In the early days of the conflict, even members of the U.S. government were publicly saying they lacked clarity on the actual objectives.
At the same time, the administration itself was offering shifting rationales for the war—moving between different justifications depending on the moment.
Translation: the people closest to the decision didn’t share a clear, consistent understanding of what they were trying to achieve.
Now take that out of geopolitics and drop it into an organization.
Picture an executive team launching a major, multi-year transformation:
The CEO is all-in and pushing aggressively forward
A few senior leaders are publicly supportive
Several others have concerns—but raise them quietly, or not at all
The rationale for the strategy subtly shifts depending on the audience
And despite all of this, the organization mobilizes anyway
Millions get spent. Teams get reorganized. Priorities get reshuffled.
A year later, the company quietly winds things down.
Not because the market changed.
Not because the idea was inherently flawed.
But because the organization never actually agreed—openly and honestly—on what it was doing or why.
If you’ve worked in any large organization, you’ve seen some version of this.
That’s the connection.
The scale is different. The consequences are obviously not comparable. But the underlying failure mode is identical:
A leader with momentum, a system that rewards alignment over challenge, and voices that exist but that don’t influence the outcome.
But most of all, a decision that moves forward anyway.
You might read all of this and think: yes, obviously. Leaders should listen. Diverse perspectives matter. Psychological safety is important.
No argument there.
But if that’s all so obvious, why do we see it so often?
Why do smart organizations, filled with capable people, still end up pursuing bad strategies, ignoring warning signs, and doubling down on decisions that clearly aren’t working?
Because knowing this dynamic exists isn’t the same as designing against it.
And that’s the part we tend to skip.
If the government of the most powerful country in the world can fall into this trap—despite access to intelligence, expertise, and competing perspectives—we shouldn’t assume our organizations are somehow immune.
We are, at best, smaller versions of the same system.
Which means the risk isn’t just catastrophic, visible failure. It’s the quieter version:
The initiative no one believes in, but everyone nods along to.
The strategy that survives because it came from the top.
The meeting where the most important thing goes unsaid.
These are the organizational equivalents of the same problem. Less dramatic. Easier to miss. But driven by the exact same conditions.
And that’s what makes them dangerous.
Because pointing out dysfunction after the fact is easy. We’re all very good at that.
What’s harder is recognizing, in real time, that the systems we’ve built—the leaders we’ve elevated, the norms we’ve reinforced, the behaviors we’ve rewarded—might be quietly steering us in the same direction.
Not toward alignment.
But toward unchallenged power.
And eventually, toward disruption that didn’t need to happen at all.