When the org won't point at the customer.

Every organisation says it puts the customer first. Most don't, and the gap isn't hypocrisy. It's that pointing an organisation outward asks the people inside it to change what they do, how they're measured, or how much their work matters — and those are real costs, borne by real people, for a benefit that lands somewhere else. The customer isn't in the room. The staff are.

So the work drifts inward. Not because anyone decided to ignore the customer, but because the people building the thing default to the version that fits how they already work. A leader who treats that as a failure to be corrected with better evidence will lose, because it isn't ignorance. It's a set of rational responses to how the organisation is actually structured — and the job is to read which response you're facing, because they don't all yield to the same thing.

I watched this play out in its plainest form once, before any of it was abstract to me. A charity I worked with was rebuilding its website, and before anyone designed a page we ran a card sort — every thing the organisation does, written on cards, staff grouping them however made sense. Most people grouped by internal team: not by what a visitor was looking for, but by how the organisation was structured to deliver it. The whole problem, sitting on a table.

The sharpest version was a single word. The program team wanted the site to say "programs" — a real term, one everyone in the sector uses. The research pointed to plainer language, the words someone outside the organisation would actually search for. "How we help."

Here's the part that matters, and the part I got wrong for years when I told this story as a lesson about customer-centricity. The person defending "programs" wasn't protecting their patch. They weren't being territorial or lazy or behind. They cared about the cause as much as anyone in the building. They simply believed "programs" carried more weight — that it was more serious, more professionally correct, more true to the work — than a soft phrase like "how we help." That's not self-interest. That's a sincere person, motivated by the mission, who read the priority differently.

That's the first thing a leader has to be able to tell apart. Sometimes the inward pull is a misaligned incentive — someone's targets or budget or bonus point one way while the customer needs another, and no amount of persuasion dissolves it, because you're asking them to argue against their own scorecard. Sometimes it's territory — the work is someone's identity and moving it feels like loss. And sometimes, like the program team, it's none of that: two people who both care, disagreeing in good faith about what serving the mission actually looks like. Same symptom — the org points inward — three completely different causes. Treat them the same and you'll fail at least twice.

Same symptom, three completely different causes. Treat them the same and you'll fail at least twice.

Because the response differs. Sincere disagreement on emphasis is often movable — you can bring the evidence, show what the customer actually does, and a person who cares about the cause will usually follow it once they see it. A misaligned incentive rarely moves that way, because the person isn't confused, they're correctly reading a system that rewards the wrong thing; there, the fix is the incentive, not the argument. Territory needs something else again. The skill isn't having one technique. It's diagnosing which of these you're standing in front of before you reach for a response.

The context changes the odds, too. In a cause-led organisation, people are more willing to subordinate their own corner to the mission, because the mission is genuinely why they're there — it's a real force you can lead with. In a commercial operation, where individual performance and bonuses are on the line, the same ask meets harder resistance, because now you're asking someone to act against what they're measured and paid to do. Neither is better or worse. But a leader who doesn't know which environment they're in, and leads the same way in both, will misjudge how much the mission can carry and how much has to be structured.

Most of this is done through influence. You work with the people, you bring the evidence, you align interests where they can be aligned — and most of the time that's enough, especially where the cause is real. But not always. Sometimes the interests genuinely can't be reconciled — the incentives point in opposite directions, or two sincere people simply won't converge — and then someone with the authority to decide has to decide, and wear the cost of deciding. That's the last resort, not the first move. The card sort went all the way to the chief executive precisely because influence had run its course and a call still had to be made. "How we help" won, and years on it's still the norm.

The failure isn't using authority. The failure is the opposite belief — that if everyone is reasonable and the data is good, the right answer surfaces on its own.

The failure isn't using authority. The failure is the opposite belief — that if everyone is reasonable and the data is good, the right answer will surface on its own. It won't, reliably. Reasonable people, all wanting the best, will still pull toward the version that fits how they work and what they believe. Leadership is partly the willingness to sit in that, read why it's happening each time, move what influence can move — and, when it can't, make the call nobody else is positioned to make.