#424 – May 9, 2026

Hearing the Unsaid, Seeing the Overlooked

 

Hello, fellow strategists!

Much of what shapes organizational performance happens below the surface — in what people choose not to say, the workarounds quietly adopted, the strategic foundations skipped in the rush to create. This edition examines the cost of silence, AI’s shadow practices at work, what keeps creative strategy on target, and ten partnership traps worth checking before you commit. Enjoy!

 

Quick Takes

Breaking Silence in the Organization

Amy Edmondson — Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School and one of the world’s leading researchers on team dynamics and organizational learning — wrote a book in 2018 that still speaks directly to leaders, especially those navigating high-stakes, high-complexity work.

The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth builds on decades of research to make a deceptively simple case: when people fear embarrassment or reprisal, they default to silence. And silence, in complex organizations, is quietly costing them.

Edmondson is careful about what psychological safety is not — it isn’t immunity from consequences, high standards, or hard feedback. People can still fail, be held accountable, or lose their jobs. What changes is that they are no longer hindered by interpersonal fear. They become willing to take the risks that candor requires.

Her framework offers three practical anchors for leaders:

• Set the stage — frame work as a learning problem rather than a performance test.
• Invite genuine participation — ask real questions and design structures that make input easy.
• Respond well — how a leader receives hard news determines whether it arrives again.

But safety isn’t solely the leader’s to build.

Edmondson’s research identifies it as a team-level phenomenon, shaped equally by peer norms, structures, and the unwritten rules of how groups handle dissent.

The caution she’d offer: psychological safety is often reduced to “be nice.” The harder work is building openness alongside accountability, not instead of it.

Boards that only hear good news. Planning processes where staff defer rather than challenge. Change efforts that stall because no one names what isn’t working. The silence is rarely defiant — it’s usually self-protective. Edmondson has studied all of it — and offers a framework for breaking that silence.

 

When Workarounds Go Underground

When people find official tools inadequate or unavailable at work, they find other ways to get the work done. That pattern is well-documented — and it can lead to resourceful invention or real risk.

A recent HBR article on enterprise AI adoption (referencing a specific large-scale corporate case) describes employees frustrated by cumbersome corporate tools who were quietly using personal AI assistants on the side, often without informing those responsible for organizational oversight.

Covert workarounds, though, are not new behaviour. They appear wherever the gap between what people need and what they are permitted to use grows wide enough.

The model documented by the authors pushes back against top-down mandates and identifies two distinct roles for success:

• Champions are the change leaders (often middle management) who lend organizational credibility and support to the effort at the frontlines.
• “Wizards” are super-users or practitioners embedded in the actual work: close enough to the friction to understand it, and close enough to their colleagues to be trusted.

Their job is not enforcement. Champions and nearby super-users draw people toward accepted practices through usefulness and proximity. They also can see what works or not, and bring high-value opportunities to the attention of management.

This structure will be familiar to anyone who has led change in complex organizations. It describes what effective adoption has always required — learning at the frontline, expertise at the edge and legitimacy from the middle.

To learn more about the AI case, see Harvard Business Review (April 2026): The Hidden Demand for AI Inside Your Company by authors Alfaro, Cabrales, Durán Roa, Garicano, Pérez del Caño, Roldán Monés, and Vieira de Santiago.

 

Why Creative Work Needs Strategic Roots

In Creative Strategy and the Business of Design, Douglas Davis makes the argument that creative work without a strategic foundation is vulnerable — to personal taste, shifting priorities, and decisions made for the wrong reasons.

His core logic follows a clear path: strong insights, grounded in data or research, lead to strong concepts. Strong concepts frame creative work that will be both more relevant and compelling. Remove any link in that chain, and you’re building without a foundation.

Davis offers a useful set of questions for moving from data to insight about a client base or target market. Ask:

• What does the data reveal about the people we’re observing — and the decisions they make?
• Does it point to an underlying truth about their values?
• Does it contradict our assumptions, or surface something we didn’t know was there?

A genuine insight, he suggests, either reframes something familiar from a new angle or makes sense of something new in a way that holds up.

The alternative is fragile. Davis acknowledges that communication campaign concepts are often built around a tagline or a single orienting sentence. That approach can work at a surface level. But without strategic roots, the “strategy” amounts to little more than a rationale for why certain words, typefaces, or colours were chosen — not a foundation for embedding the work itself in your organizational goals. It leaves everything exposed to the preferences of whoever happens to be in the room.

 

8020Info Drill-Down:

Partnership Traps: What to Check Before You Commit

Organizations trying to make progress in a complex system —or that are starved for resources— often look to strategic partnerships to achieve their goals. Such collaborations are sometimes necessary and often attractive, but they should be considered first with great care.

Here’s how strategic partnerships can get stuck or break down:

• Do your mandates and contexts contain inherent conflict? Do you and your potential partner(s) operate in environments compatible with your individual goals, roles, accountabilities, capabilities, cultures and timelines?
• Can you define a clear charter for the collaboration — one that establishes the purpose, scope, roles, authorities, boundaries, assumptions, constraints, commitments, communications, resource requirements, and shared measures of success? Without agreed metrics, it’s hard to know whether the partnership is working — or when to change course.
• Are the motivations fully on the table? Partners sometimes enter collaborations for reasons they haven’t fully disclosed — access to funding, political positioning, reputational gain. When those underlying interests surface, they can corrode trust quickly. It’s worth asking early: what does each partner actually need to get from this?
• Is there a power imbalance or asymmetry? Significant differences in organizational size, resources or status often distort decision-making — and can leave the smaller or less-resourced partner feeling subordinated rather than genuinely collaborative.
• Will you have to settle for “lowest common denominator” options? Partner interests may diverge from time to time. Will you be able to negotiate attractive outcomes for all — or will you have to accept mediocre results just to get past conflicts? Consider how disagreements will be resolved before they arise.
• How might different organizational cultures lead to misinterpretation? How might your words and intentions mean different things in the language of a different organizational culture?
• Is there risk of being “joined at top but disconnected below”? What will happen when execution falls to middle managers or front-line staff who were not involved in negotiating or as a party to the agreement?
• What about commitment and follow-through? Will your partner(s) make your project a priority? Or will their engagement be “on the side of the desk,” soon buried by other day-to-day pressures?
• What happens when leadership changes? The champions who negotiated the partnership may move on. Without enduring structural commitment, not just personal relationships, the collaboration can quietly lose its footing when key people leave.
• Is there an exit strategy? Even productive partnerships eventually run their course. Without agreed-upon conditions for winding down, endings can be as damaging as the partnership was valuable.

You may have additional concerns about dynamics, personalities and control — but a partnership that passes these 10 “tests” makes for a stronger strategy.

 

For Your Reading List:  The Essential Porter

Michael Porter’s frameworks for strategy and competition are everywhere. But his ideas are less understood than they appear. Understanding Michael Porter, written with Porter’s full cooperation by his longtime HBR editor Joan Magretta, is a concise guide that corrects persistent misconceptions:  beating the competition is about being unique, not best; strategy is about deliberate trade-offs, not sweeping ambition or trying to be all things to all customers/clients. It offers a reliable compass for anyone whose work involves choosing — and sustaining — a distinctive direction.

 

Closing Thought:  The Dogged Path to Extraordinary

“The secret is to show up, do the work, and go home. A blue-collar work ethic married to an indomitable will … Nothing interferes. Nothing can sway you from your purpose. Once the decision is made, simply refuse to budge.”
  — Gymnastics coach Christopher Sommer, as quoted in Tim Ferriss, Tools of Titans (2016)