The dinner was in Brussels, late enough that the second bottle of Bordeaux had been opened without announcement. Twelve senior executives, good suits, the usual fog of polite agreement that settles over tables like this. Then the CEO of a mid-size industrial group put his glass down and said, very quietly: “We announced the transformation eighteen months ago. We have the slide deck. We have the steering committee. We hired the consultants. Nothing has actually changed.”
Nobody disagreed. Nobody looked surprised, either, which was the more interesting detail.
I have been in that room so many times I could describe the art on the walls before I arrive. The pattern never varies: an organization that has confused announcing change with making it, a leadership team that has mistaken the vocabulary of transformation for the substance, a communications function that reports to finance and wonders why nobody believes it anymore.
That is the thesis. Leadership without honest communication is theater. Communication without organizational courage is background noise that sounds vaguely aspirational. Change without both is a rebranding exercise with a nicer font.
And in 2026, with friction showing its teeth after a decade of frictionless-growth mythology, there is no longer anywhere comfortable to hide.
What this pillar covers
How do leaders stay credible when the ground keeps moving? How do you communicate a transformation without sounding like a corporate hostage reading from a laminated card? What does real organizational change look like?
This pillar covers leadership judgment under real uncertainty, communications strategy in a post-trust environment, and organizational change as it happens on the ground, not as it gets announced at the all-hands with branded tote bags. Built from three decades of watching the gap between executive decks and operational reality get opened, widened, and very occasionally closed.
1. The vocabulary problem in leadership
Most leadership failures are vocabulary failures first.
A company announces its “transformation strategy.” The CEO emails all staff about the “exciting journey ahead.” The board approves a “roadmap to operational excellence,” and everybody nods with the rhythm of those little plastic drinking-bird toys that used to sit on Palo Alto office desks in the nineties.
None of these phrases mean anything specific, which is precisely why they are chosen. Specificity is frightening. Specificity implies accountability. Specificity means someone can come back in eighteen months and check, and nobody who chose the phrase “operational excellence” in a committee is interested in being checked.
After thirty years of strategy work, the pattern I see most often is not malice but something more insidious: leaders who have been rewarded so consistently for managing upward that they have lost the habit of describing reality plainly. They speak the dialect of the executive floor, a language optimized for slides and steering committees, and are sincerely surprised when the people three layers down cannot decode it. The surprise is sincere. That is the worst part.
The vocabulary problem compounds dramatically in a crisis. I spent years doing crisis communications for multinational clients, and the first thing that breaks when a crisis arrives is language. The lawyers appear. Every sentence gets approved by a committee. The CEO statement emerges sounding like a legal brief dressed in empathy language and issued wearing a fleece vest, and the audience, who are not stupid, reads it as exactly what it is.
If you want people to act, tell a fucking story. Plain language. Specific facts. Named people. A clear account of what happens next and why, not “we are committed to our stakeholders.” Committed to what? By when? Measured by whom?
The organizations that handle change well do not communicate better than the others. They communicate more honestly. Those are different things entirely, and the gap between them is where most transformation programs go to die quietly.
2. Communications as operational design (not a department)
Most executives still think communications is a support function that produces press releases and manages difficult journalists. The trust architecture of your organization gets built or burned through communications choices, as systematically as through your incentive structures or your org chart, and considerably faster in the burning direction.
How you structure who speaks, what they say, when they refuse to say anything, what they acknowledge when things go wrong: all of this shapes organizational trust with the same structural force as your incentive design. The age of insularity means trust is now the scarcest resource in most organizations, and you build it or drain it through choices about how you talk to people. Most organizations treat those choices as a formatting question.
I watched Marc Pritchard of P&G take a baseball bat to the media industry from the Dmexco stage, calling out the waste, opacity, and lack of accountability built into programmatic advertising. It cost him uncomfortable rooms. It earned him credibility no campaign budget could have bought. Katrien Herwege at Eneco is built from the same understanding: a communications leader who thinks in structures and consequences, not channels and content calendars (the channel is the loudspeaker; the message is the music; most corporate communications teams optimize for loudspeaker quality and forget they have nothing to say).
The LinkedIn algorithm demands a sacrifice, and most corporate communications teams are feeding it AI-generated content at industrial scale, volume over signal, until the feed fills with material that sounds like leadership and contains none. Fake news is not the problem. Authentic-sounding emptiness, machine-crafted and committee-approved, is the problem. The signal premium goes to whoever sounds like an actual human with an actual point of view.
3. Change theater versus real change
Every transformation I have watched up close has two layers. There is the announced transformation, with its roadmap and steering committee and launch event with branded merchandise that will live in a drawer by February. Then there is the actual change, which is quieter, messier, slower, and usually has no discernible relationship with the launch event. Reinventing organizations is a slow reorientation of incentives, norms, and expectations, most of which happens below the waterline of any official program and almost none of which makes it into the progress reports.
I call the announced version “change theater,” and what makes it theater is specific: the gap between what leaders say they value and what they choose to fund. An organization that announces psychological safety and punishes the first person who speaks inconvenient truth has added a new vocabulary to an unchanged culture, which is a very expensive way to make the problem worse.
First exercise: I ask the leadership team to describe, in plain sentences, what their last big change program changed in how decisions get made. Not the deliverables. Not the press release. What changed. The answers tend to be elaborate, defensive, and increasingly imaginative as the silence stretches, which is itself the diagnostic, because nobody who changed something real has to think that hard about it.
Getting off that Freudian couch is the hard part. Past a certain point, understanding why an organization resists change becomes an alibi for not moving, and the organizations with the most sophisticated explanations for their own inertia tend to be the ones that move least.
The Red Monkey is the test that cuts through all of this.
Every organization has one: the contrarian who builds things nobody asked for, the uncomfortable questioner, the person who makes rooms slightly difficult by being accurate at inconvenient moments. When a company is doing real transformation, it protects that person. When a company is doing change theater, it eliminates that person and calls it “alignment.” The word “alignment,” in my experience, does more organizational damage than most restructuring programs.
4. The CEO communication mistake (and the trust collapse it accelerates)
The most expensive communication mistake a CEO makes is treating internal audiences like external ones.
Somewhere between their first significant promotion and the executive floor, most leaders acquire a kind of communication armor: every question handled with a prepared message, every conversation treated as a liability, every difficult truth wrapped in qualifier language until it has no edges. Smooth, consistent, perfectly calibrated for investor calls.
Applied internally, it destroys the trust it was designed to protect.
Edelman’s 2026 Trust Barometer makes this structural, not anecdotal. Trust now operates in smaller, tighter circles. The carefully calibrated corporate voice reads as institutional, which now reads as suspect. The brands that survive this are the ones that put their values on the fence and stay there when it costs something, not the ones that commission empathy campaigns and restructure the same people they filmed looking inspired.
Saying “I don’t know” and “we got this wrong” is the most underpriced asset in any leadership team. It costs nothing to deploy, almost no one can do it, and it holds trust through turbulence at a rate no message architecture can replicate. Dear Donald: ruling a news cycle and building organizational trust are different activities with different ROI profiles. You can dominate a narrative for eighteen months and arrive at the other side with nothing durable.
5. Leadership when the org chart dissolves
The org chart is still on the wall of every HR department, describing the reporting structure while having almost nothing to say about how work gets done. When AI agents handle multi-step tasks and cross-functional teams form and dissolve on a project cadence, the manager who derived authority from knowing the full picture is watching that picture become available in real time to anyone with the right access.
Something survives this shift.
Judgment. The ability to make a decent call with imperfect information and real consequences. AI is faster at aggregation, cheaper at executing defined processes, and costs less per hour than the middle management layer it replaces. It does not have an adequate substitute for judgment, and that is the thing both hardest to automate and most persistently devalued in organizations that confuse decision-making with decision-approving.
Curiosity is the precursor. I have watched enough organizations flatten themselves in efficiency drives to know what they cut first: the questioning. The people who ask “why are we doing this?” They slow down decisions, so they go. They are also the people who prevent the catastrophic wrong decisions that take eighteen months and several board resignations to unwind, but that cost lands later, and later does not show up in this quarter’s restructuring spreadsheet.
Commander Hadfield’s lesson is worth the read: in conditions of high complexity and real stakes, the mental habit that matters most is not confidence but preparation. You do not survive a spacewalk by believing everything will be fine. You survive it by having thought, in specific detail, through what happens when it is not.
6. The five-year plan problem and what to replace it with
Your five-year plan is a fantasy novel. I wrote that in January 2026, and the executives who disagreed most forcefully were, without exception, the ones with the most elaborate plans. This tracks.
The problem is the assumption of linearity in a nonlinear environment, and the institutional incentive to defend the plan against contrary evidence, because the alternative is admitting you spent six months building something that is now wrong. 2025 was the year everything changed in ways those plans did not account for. AI capabilities moved on a quarterly clock. Geopolitical variables rewrote procurement assumptions. Most strategy decks ignored both because neither fit cleanly into a horizon chart.
Replace the five-year plan with a clear sense of what you are protecting, what you will sacrifice to protect it, and the organizational habits (honest internal communication, protected questioners, regular reality checks three layers below the executive floor) that allow you to update your picture of reality faster than your competitors. That is a leadership stance, and it requires considerably more courage than approving a slide deck.
What this means for executive practice
Five concrete things.
1. Audit your language before your strategy. Take your last three major announcements to employees and count the sentences with a specific, verifiable claim. If the ratio is below 30%, fix the language first. This is a one-afternoon exercise that most organizations never do because the results are uncomfortable.
2. Run the “three layers down” test. Pick one strategic decision from last quarter. Ask someone three levels below the executive floor what it means for their work. If the answer does not match your intent, you have a communications gap, and knowing it exists is where closing it starts.
3. Map the actual change, not the announced change. For every formal change program, name one thing that measurably changed in how decisions get made or how people get rewarded. If you cannot name it, the program is producing very expensive costumes.
4. Protect the uncomfortable questioners. Before your next restructuring, identify the people who most reliably tell you things you do not want to hear. Put them on the protected list. If they appear on the efficiency list, the invoice for that trade will arrive at the worst possible moment.
5. Speak like a human, not a brand. Write the next difficult communication without consulting legal or HR. Read it out loud. If it sounds like a press release in a fleece vest, start over.
The fleece vest does not fool anyone. It never did.
I do this work through keynote speaking (the Odin keynote on leadership, communications, and change is for boards and leadership teams who have earned the honest version; the Ragnarok keynote takes the broader strategic picture), strategic advisory, and training programs for senior teams in the real version of transformation.
If you want the version that makes everyone comfortable, I am the wrong choice. If you want the version that is accurate, we should talk.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between change management and real organizational change?
Change management is the formal program: the roadmap, the steering committee, the process maps, the newsletter with the transformation mascot. Real organizational change is the shift in how decisions get made, resources allocated, and behavior rewarded. Most organizations run change management programs without producing real change, because the formal program never reaches the informal norms that govern behavior. Real change is visible three levels below the executive floor, not on the program dashboard. If your change program has a logo but you cannot name one decision that gets made differently than it did before, you are managing the appearance of change.
Why do organizational transformations fail so often?
Most transformations fail because they treat the announcement as the change. A strategy deck, a launch event, a steering committee: these are planning artifacts, not organizational change. The real work is the shift in incentives, norms, and expectations that follows. That work is slower, messier, and less photogenic than the launch event, which is why most programs stall at the announcement stage and produce elaborate progress reports that describe activity rather than change. The other consistent failure mode: mastering the language of transformation without changing the behaviors the language describes. That is an expensive way to make the underlying problem worse.
What is the Red Monkey and why does it matter for leadership?
The Red Monkey is the contrarian in your organization: the person who builds things nobody asked for, asks the questions nobody wants to hear, and makes consensus harder and decisions better. When organizations restructure or run efficiency drives, the Red Monkey is usually among the first to go, because friction-generators are expensive in the short term and nobody misses them until something catastrophic happens that they would have flagged. They are the people who prevent the wrong decisions that cost eighteen months and several board resignations to fix. Protecting the Red Monkey during change is one of the highest-impact leadership choices available, and almost nobody makes it.
How should a CEO communicate during organizational change?
Specifically, frequently, and with a willingness to say what you do not yet know. The communication armor that executives develop for investor calls (smooth, consistent, non-committal) destroys trust when applied internally. People three levels below the executive floor are not stupid; they can read the gap between managed language and operational reality with considerable precision, and they discuss it in detail during the five minutes after your all-hands ends. The CEOs who hold trust through turbulence are the ones who say ‘here is what we know, here is what we do not know, here is who is accountable for what’ in plain sentences, without the fleece vest of corporate empathy language.
What does executive communications actually include?
More than most executives think. It includes how you communicate during a crisis and the preparation that makes that possible before the crisis arrives. It includes how you communicate a transformation to the organization at multiple levels simultaneously without losing coherence or credibility. It includes how you build and maintain external credibility when trust is structurally declining across all institutional categories. It includes how you calibrate your public voice in a media environment flooded with AI-generated noise, where sounding like a human being has become a competitive differentiator. And it includes deciding what not to say, which is underrated. Silence is a communications choice too, and it should be made deliberately rather than by default.
Is trust really declining? What does the data show?
Edelman’s 2026 Trust Barometer, built on 40,000 respondents across 28 countries surveyed at the end of 2025, describes an ‘age of insularity’: people retreating into smaller, safer circles, unwilling to trust anyone outside their familiar tribe. Seven in ten respondents are now hesitant or outright unwilling to trust someone who differs from them in core values. Business remains one of the last pools of institutional trust, but that pool is under pressure from AI-generated content that floods every channel, from organizational behavior that consistently fails to match stated values, and from a general public mood that is sober, bordering on grim. The organizations holding trust are doing it through operational choices: consistent behavior, local roots, real accountability, voices that sound like actual humans.
How do you lead an organization when the org chart no longer describes how work gets done?
You lead by focusing on outcomes, judgment, and the quality of questions being asked rather than on process compliance and reporting structure. When AI agents handle multi-step tasks and cross-functional teams form and dissolve on a project cadence, the old model of managing through hierarchical visibility breaks down at speed. What survives is the ability to create conditions for good decisions: protecting the people who ask uncomfortable questions, maintaining honest internal communication at every level, and building the organizational habit of updating your picture of reality faster than your competitors can update theirs.
What is wrong with most five-year strategic plans?
The core problem is the assumption that the environment will behave in a roughly linear way over five years, and the institutional incentive to defend the plan against contrary evidence once it exists. In a context where AI capabilities are advancing on a quarterly clock, geopolitical variables are rewriting procurement assumptions, and trust dynamics are shifting faster than strategy decks are updated, a five-year plan is a very confident bet on a version of the future that will almost certainly not materialize. The executives who disagreed most forcefully when I wrote this had, without exception, the most elaborate plans. Build for adaptability and a clear sense of what you are protecting, not for a fixed destination you will spend year three explaining away.
How does AI change the communications environment for organizations?
In two conflicting ways simultaneously. AI makes it cheaper and faster to produce more content, which is causing every organizational communication channel to fill with high-volume, plausible-sounding material that contains no actual point of view. This is raising the signal premium: audiences are getting better at distinguishing real human voice from machine-generated noise, even when they cannot articulate exactly how. Simultaneously, AI makes it harder to be heard at all in a flooded information environment. The strategic response is to produce less, but better: specific, accountable, human, with a real point of view that could not have been generated by feeding a brief into a prompt and approving the output in a fifteen-minute meeting.
What is the relationship between leadership and organizational culture?
Culture is what happens when the leader leaves the room. It is the behavioral residue of the incentive structures, the tolerated behaviors, the stories that get told about who succeeded and why, and the things that are punished informally even when they are praised formally in the all-hands presentation. Leaders shape culture through their choices more than through their communications: who they protect, who they promote, what they ignore, what they react to. An organization that says it values psychological safety while consistently punishing the first person who raises a difficult truth has a culture. It is just not the one in the slide deck, and the gap between those two documents is where most transformation programs get quietly swallowed.
What makes a communications strategy effective during a crisis?
Speed, specificity, and the willingness to say what you do not yet know. In a crisis, the organization’s instinct is to slow down communication precisely when the audience needs it to speed up: legal review, message approval, committee sign-off, the statement that emerges three days late sounding like it was written by a committee that was trying to avoid saying anything. The organizations that manage crises well have made their communications decisions before the crisis arrives: who speaks, what they say when they do not yet have all the information, what they will acknowledge regardless of legal exposure. Preparation is the work. The statement is just the output.
Who is this pillar for?
Senior leaders, communications directors, and board members who are inside real organizational change, not the announced version. People who have sat in the room where the transformation slide deck gets approved and felt, quite precisely, the gap between the language on the slides and the reality on the ground. Executives who want a perspective on leadership and communications calibrated against thirty years of doing the actual work across multiple sectors and geographies, not against a framework assembled from other people’s case studies and presented with great confidence by someone who has not personally been in the room when it failed.
A closing thought
I have been in enough transformation rooms to have a reasonably accurate picture of how organizations change. The honest version involves more confusion, more backtracking, and more moments where the most important leadership act is to say, out loud: “This is not working.”
The executives who get this right have the most honest picture of their organization, and the daily courage to say what they see. The frameworks are secondary. The honesty is the thing.
Get off the Freudian couch and move. Save the Red Monkey. The next time you are about to approve a transformation announcement, ask whether it describes what is happening, or what you wish were happening.
Those are different documents, and everyone in the building knows which one they are reading.
