What happens to a company when folks realize its purpose is disconnected from reality? Flock Safety is finding out.

In situations where the underlying cause of the issue is structural, swapping in a new CEO doesn’t work. The new leader walks into the same failed (and invisible) Rules layer. The targets and the penalty for missing them haven't moved. The people who learned to smooth results are still there, and so is the founder's influence. So the new leader either keeps the pressure on and inherits the problem, or backs off and gets blamed for missed results. Either way, they're the one w

We’re stuck with two options. Keep the decision open and pay for it with bursts of energy, or plan ahead and pay for it in missed predictions and wasted effort. Most leaders and orgs pick a lane, and the failure they can't manage is the one that hides in their strength.

Building a team around one star is brittle and failure-prone by design, not by bad luck. A star is temporary. Stars transfer, retire, burn out, or leave for an avocado farm, so the club that rests its results on them is running on a clock it can’t see. The problem shows up while the star is still there. Every team skill the star replaces just rots on the vine. By the time the star is gone, the team has spent months destroying the crop it will depend on.

Six months after a change effort is when you find out whether it actually worked. Not during the rollout, when attention is high and the new way of working is still novel. Six months later, when the next crisis has arrived and the champion who drove the initiative has moved on to something else. That's when you find out whether the improvement was built into the structure or just held in place by effort.