For over a year, the booster rocket engineer Roger Boisjoly and his colleagues had been worrying about rubber. Specifically, they were concerned with O-rings: How these massive rubber loops—which prevent searing hot, pressurized gases from leaking out of the joints—behaved in extreme temperatures. In 1973, NASA had contracted Boisjoly’s employer, Morton Thiokol, to produce boosters for its Challenger shuttle. In later tests, his team determined that while hot combustion gases would press the O-rings outward to form a tighter seal, cold weather could cause them to stiffen, potentially preventing the seal from closing when it needed to.

On January 28, 1986, the morning the Challenger was scheduled to launch, the temperature at Cape Canaveral, Florida, had dropped to 36 degrees. That was cold enough for sheets of ice to cling to the launch tower, where these rubber rings were about to be put to the ultimate test. The night before, Boisjoly and his fellow engineers begged their managers not to let NASA proceed as scheduled, but the bosses wouldn’t hear it. According to one report, NASA’s George Hardy was appalled at the recommendation to delay. Another shuttle program manager, Lawrence Mulloy, didn’t hide his disdain: “My God, Thiokol [engineers], when do you want me to launch–next April?”

The pressure was palpable, and the final decision to launch was made by Thiokol managers; the engineers were deliberately not given a vote. The engineers had done the math and knew the mission was doomed. The space shuttle broke apart 73 seconds into its flight, killing all seven crew members.

Having access to the right information, the right people, and at the right time is a gift. But organizations are structured for ignorance when they don’t know, don’t want to know, or don’t want you to know something that might inhibit their view of success.

Teams that respond or react to pending challenges confront inconvenient truths early. Teams that ruminate or reduce friction prioritize comfort and calm ahead of clarity. They may slowly lose the ability to see reality before small risks become catastrophic failures.

Organizational Ignorance

Although not as catastrophic as the Challenger disaster, I once worked for a non-profit whose organizational culture was so siloed and fractured that the president was forced to resign after getting embroiled in a Ponzi scheme using company funds. By ignoring best practices in financial protocols, transparency, and board approvals, this president presided over multi-million-dollar losses resulting from repeated decisions that refused to heed the wisdom around him. Although the president might have had the best of intentions, the system around him was making way for unchecked authority that would ultimately cost everyone.

Agnotology is the study of how ignorance gets actively produced and maintained, often strategically. The term comes from the work of Robert Proctor, a historian of science at Stanford. In the 1990s, Proctor was studying tobacco industry documents, in what we now know was a sophisticated and well-funded attempt to manufacture doubt and confusion about the established health risks of smoking. Proctor distinguishes three types of ignorance, which I think also apply to organizations (examples in italics are mine):

1. Ignorance as a Native State: the condition of not yet knowing. We don’t know if the market will buy this new product because it’s new.

2. Ignorance as Lost or Selective Knowledge: when knowledge is ignored, forgotten, buried, or left unexplored. We know our main source of revenue won’t last forever, but we’re not going to do anything to fix it now.

3. Ignorance as a Deliberately Engineered Construct: ignorance deliberately constructed to serve interests. We are pursuing the mission set out by this CEO regardless.

In the wake of the Challenger disaster and the non-profit president’s financial misbehavior, ignorance was baked into the system, making it okay not to heed what the people and the data were saying. The system—the organizational culture—will continue to facilitate bad decisions until it is constructed or disrupted otherwise.

A Better Way

They say that knowledge is power, but ignorance might be even more powerful. That is the danger of organizational ignorance, which is the Antagonist in this story. Organizational ignorance is usually structural, not intellectual. Organizations naturally become better at seeing what helps them move and worse at seeing what threatens momentum. Over time, inconvenient truths become slower to surface and easier to disregard.

But once an organization becomes structurally incapable of seeing reality clearly, decline, disaster, or deceit become inevitable long before they become visible.

But there is a different path, and it is possible to reform bad organizational habits.

Put This Antagonist to Work

In my work with principals and their teams to overcome organizational ignorance, three things come to mind for defeating this Antagonist.

1. Watch for the moment when the room gets smaller. Whether it’s dismissing warnings from an engineering team and excluding them from the final decision, or the board of directors who fulfill the perception of good governance but are really just a rubber stamp, the culture will make way for what it already practices. Notice who gets excused from which conversations, and why. That’s where ignorance gets manufactured in real time.

2. Make it cheap to say the inconvenient thing. If raising a concern costs someone relational or political capital, no one can afford to be honest. Written pre-mortems, anonymous dissent channels, and a recurring question—like what are we choosing not to look at right now?—will lower that cost enough for the truth to surface before it is too difficult to acknowledge.

3. Watch what happens to the people who speak up. This is where the organization’s real values are tested. If the people who speak up get promoted, it signals the organization is willing to look at itself. If they’re marginalized or managed out, you’re teaching everyone else to look away.

Three Questions for Confronting This Antagonist

Consider these questions for your own reflection or to spark a team conversation about some of the elements for confronting the organizational ignorance Antagonist.

1. What is your organization structured to ignore?

2. What does it over-emphasize that might be compensating for its ignorance?

3. How could you rally as a team to face more inconvenient truths?

The temptation to beat this Antagonist is to be an organization that just accumulates more knowledge. Not terrible, but not sufficient. You defeat this Antagonist by building a structure that can’t afford to look away.

The Antagonist is already at work. Are you?

Does this Content Resonate?

Every organization has an Antagonist. Most leaders can’t name theirs.

After serving as a founder, facilitator, CEO, and chief of staff over the past 30 years, I know it’s not due to a lack of intelligence. It’s due to a lack of visibility.

So I built a short assessment to help you find it. In eight questions and less than five minutes, you’ll get a sense of where the friction in your organization is coming from. After that, if you like, we can jump on a free 30-minute call to discuss more.

Take the 5-minute assessment →

A galvanizing enemy is more powerful than an inspiring vision.

In 1973, Yvon Chouinard turned a small climbing-gear business into Patagonia. By the 1980s, he was donating 1% of sales to environmental groups. In 2022, he gave the entire company away, transferring ownership to a trust and nonprofit designed to funnel every dollar of profit into fighting climate change. Patagonia is a company that decided the planet’s unraveling was the enemy and built itself around the fight.

Likewise, payment processor Stripe built its business on eliminating friction in online commerce. Toyota organized an entire production system around the eradication of waste. Khan Academy is fighting educational inequality, and Duolingo is eliminating language barriers.

Each of these companies identified a force worth opposing and built everything around it.

In 2009, Yael Cohen’s mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, so she made a T-shirt that summed up the sentiment: Fuck Cancer. Years later, Cohen and Julie Greenbaum, who had launched F*ck Cancer in honor of her late mother, merged their organizations to rally against a resistance that put a middle finger to something emotionally resonant.

For organizations like these, the enemy is obvious. Cancer. Climate change. Inequality. Barriers to access. The stakes are clear, the opposition is named, and the work organizes around it. Most organizations talk about what they want to build, where they want to go, and how they want to grow, all of which matters. But without something to push against, the work stays abstract. It lacks urgency. It competes with everything else.

A named enemy changes the calculus. It becomes a decision filter. Patagonia can ask whether a product, supplier, or campaign advances the fight against environmental degradation. Toyota can trace thousands of improvements back to a single objective: eliminating waste. Stripe can evaluate features based on the amount of friction that can be tolerated, which is instantly measurable in real time. The enemy creates coherence. It aligns priorities, clarifies tradeoffs, and gives people a reason to care beyond the standard metrics.

A named enemy collapses ambiguity. Generic adversaries are diffuse, slow-moving, and impersonal. Giving the enemy a name and a middle finger turns an abstract misfortune into something you can stand against, which is psychologically much more activating than standing for something vague like “awareness.” It gives permission to real emotions, validating the rage people might feel against cancer or climate change, rather than asking them to relegate it to a 5k fun run.

A named enemy creates instant in-group cohesion (and sorts out people who might not be the right fit). Shared enemies bond humans faster than shared values, which take time to articulate and agree on. “We hate this thing together” is a complete social contract in five words.

When an organization can name what it refuses to tolerate, and define what it is willing to fight for, it activates an alignment that no org chart can produce.

Put This Antagonist to Work

In my work with senior leaders who are eager to mobilize their organizations with a sense of priority and urgency, I see that naming and framing the resistance is where so many get stuck. Decades of management tropes have focused on leading with vision or mission statements and aspirational language.

Here’s what I have found to be most constructive:

1. Find the fury and follow it. Yael and Julie didn’t sit in a strategy session to pick their adversary. They were already outraged, and the organization formed around the rage. Ask your team what genuinely makes them angry about the industry and its status quo. The answer is usually closer to your real enemy than your mission statement is.

2. Make the enemy specific enough to fight. “Inefficiency” is not an enemy. “The 14 days it takes to onboard a customer when it should take two” is. Vague adversaries produce vague responses. Toyota didn’t fight “slow,” it fought waste (muda in Japanese). Then they defined seven types of muda and integrated those definitions into their production system so employees knew what to look for on Monday morning.

3. Test it against the trade-offs. A real enemy forces you to say no to things. If naming yours doesn’t make some current project, partnership, or product look suddenly indefensible, you haven’t named it yet. Patagonia gave away the company. You know the enemy is real when it’s expensive to avoid.

Three Questions for Confronting This Antagonist

Consider these questions for your own reflection or to spark a team conversation.

1. What would your organization say “no more” to if it spoke honestly?

2. Where are you trying to inspire action without defining what must be resisted?

3. How could you rally as a team against a resistance that would make your priorities instantly clearer?

Organizations are born for all kinds of reasons, but nothing accelerates forward momentum like a middle finger to a problem worth fighting.

The Antagonist is already at work. Are you?

Does this Content Resonate?

Every organization has an Antagonist. Most leaders can’t name theirs.

After serving as a founder, facilitator, CEO, and chief of staff over the past 30 years, I know it’s not due to a lack of intelligence. It’s due to a lack of visibility.

So I built a short assessment to help you find it. In eight questions and less than five minutes, you’ll get a sense of where the friction in your organization is coming from. After that, if you like, we can jump on a free 30-minute call to discuss more.

Take the 5-minute assessment →

Photo by Nguyễn Hiệp on Unsplash

The environment was perfect for our working session. Light poured in from the floor-to-ceiling windows, revealing sun-soaked mountains on one side and a serene waterscape on the other. It was a spectacular setting for the day’s agenda. I was there to facilitate an eclectic group of partners for the strategic use and development of a long-held, underdeveloped property that had now become prime real estate in Southern California. In walked the founder and principal, a brilliant mix of well-worn wisdom, kind candor, and a flurry of ideas. He was a proven giant in the industry niche he dominated (large-scale full-service real estate development), and his decades of experience showed up in his stories, examples, and instincts.

But this day was going to be different. He was contracting with specialists in their fields to complement his own domain of expertise. The ingredients were just right, and I was looking forward to facilitating a lively discussion about the creation, development, and building of something new; something this principal cared about deeply. With the land and funding secured, this visionary was ready to go.

What started as a beautiful day primed for lively discussion and direction turned into a multi-hour monologue of “brilliance,” interrupted every once in a while by the principal’s own request for someone else to inject something even better. But before anyone could say something, the resident genius was on to a new story, idea, or example.

This is not the first time I have facilitated dominating contributors; I actually love the challenge. But something about this day stuck with me beyond the burden of indignant bloviating or a brash personality. This leader was in his own way. His self-interference became the Antagonist to what could be possible.

When the founder, principal, or loudest voice speaks with strong convictions, force, and certainty, alternative ideas struggle to gain air.

Uber Problems

In the early years of Uber, executive meetings often carried the intensity of a competitive sport. Founder and CEO Travis Kalanick was famously sharp, fast-talking, and relentless in debate. Colleagues described sessions where Kalanick would pace, interrupt, and rapidly dismantle ideas he didn’t like while simultaneously pushing his own forward with infectious conviction. The room moved at his speed, and the abundance of intelligence and vision that poured from Kalanick became the gravitational pull that dominated the day.

Over time, the smartest people in the room begin editing themselves, or even looking for the nearest exit. Why be in the room for what you bring if the person dominating the room won’t make space for anybody but themselves?

In situations where the primary person becomes a primary obstacle, I don’t think it’s incompetence or arrogance, even though it can easily come across that way. The speed, certainty, and volume of a leader’s own thinking fill the space where anything different could emerge, perhaps an overcompensation for something they lack. A good leader genuinely wants better ideas. But here’s the thing: Teams don’t run out of ideas; they run out of oxygen for those ideas to surface.

The paradox is cruel because the same intelligence that enabled success becomes the force limiting the future.

Put This Antagonist to Work

The most effective leaders deploy a counterintuitive discipline that overcomes this Antagonist: curiosity and restraint.

• Restraint is resisting the urge to change the conversation, to stifle momentum, or to articulate your superior alternative. Because of power dynamics, the room is likely to give your words greater weight already. What’s on your mind matters, but only if it’s contributing to the energy already in motion. You know you need more restraint when you are more ready to talk than you are to listen.

• Listening cultivates curiosity. Rather than contradicting, arguing, or silencing a conversation, what does it look like to ask questions? Questions that might push the topic further, expand its scope, or narrow its focus. Inherent in most questions is a bias, which means you can let that carry your intent, and get to the part that pulls more out of others. The inner child in all of us still loves it when people ask us questions.

As someone who works closely with principals to facilitate critical conversations—whether creative or conflict-laden—I am operating in the best interest of the organization and all the participants involved. And I know where the buck stops, which gives principals peace of mind that the outsider won’t work against what matters.

Great leaders learn to conquer the self-interference Antagonist head-on when they stop talking and get out of their own way.

Three Questions for Confronting This Antagonist

Consider these questions for your own reflection or to spark a team conversation about some of the elements for confronting the self-interference Antagonist.

1. Do people in your meetings build on ideas or wait for you to finish yours?

2. What ideas never get oxygen?

3. How could you rally as a team against self-interference?

Your team members likely aren’t craving more of your brilliance. What they want are cues to see what there is room for in discussions and decision-making.

The Antagonist is already at work. Are you?

Does this Content Resonate?

Every organization has an Antagonist. Most leaders can’t name theirs.

After serving as a founder, facilitator, CEO, and chief of staff over the past 30 years, I know it’s not due to a lack of intelligence. It’s due to a lack of visibility.

So I built a short assessment to help you find it. In eight questions and less than 5 minutes, you’ll get a sense of where the friction in your organization is coming from. After that, if you like, we can jump on a free 30-minute call to discuss more.

Take the 5-minute assessment →

Photo by Wietse Jongsma on Unsplash

I caught some sort of virus a few weeks back, and it knocked me out for about 10 days, much longer than my normal recovery time for something like this. As is often the case, my appetite decreased, and I lost weight, even without exercise. With the illness in my rearview mirror, much to my chagrin, my body weight has returned to what it was before I got sick. This “set point” theory is part of the body’s broader effort to maintain homeostasis (internal balance), nudging me back toward a familiar baseline.

I’m sure there is a biological benefit to this (survival, stability, blah, blah, blah), but what a bummer. It’s not like I had the fridge stocked with surplus snacks to make up for the lost calories.

Along with the body’s set point, there is also the concept of neural muscle memory. Like riding a bicycle or tying shoes, this form of muscle memory means quick coordination based on the previous machinery the body and brain have already built.

These set points and muscle memories are also at work in organizations. After significant transformations, transitions, or changes, the culture will revert to its familiar set points. The neural muscle memory of the organization relies on the calluses of its previous coordination.

This is not a flaw. It’s a feature.

Organizations, like bodies, are designed for survival before they are designed for transformation. Stability is rewarded. Familiar rhythms feel safe. Old coordination patterns fire quickly. The system knows how to operate at its previous baseline.

And after a major initiative, leadership change, strategic pivot, or cultural reset, the pullback to normal is almost automatic.

Meetings drift back to their old tone. Decision-making authority re-centers. Risk tolerance narrows. The same voices regain influence. The same habits reassert themselves.

The system is doing what systems do because homeostasis is efficient and muscle memory is fast. But both are indifferent to your strategy.

This is where leaders misdiagnose the problem. They blame attitude. They blame buy-in. They blame middle management. They blame fatigue. The system prefers the familiar.

When stress increases, the organization falls back to its defaults. That’s muscle memory.

And unless you intentionally retrain the system, it will always return to its previous baseline. Which is why real transformation feels exhausting. It’s less about change and more about retraining.

If you want a new strategic direction, you must build new calluses. If you want a new culture, you must rehearse new coordination. If you want a new set point, you must survive long enough at a new baseline for it to become normal.

Otherwise, organizational homeostasis is the Antagonist that will win every time.

The gravitational pull toward a set point is powerful because it’s stabilizing. But what once protected you may now be constraining you.

The Antagonist is already at work. Are you?

Three Questions for Confronting This Antagonist

1. After your last major change, what quietly returned?

2. What is your organization’s default set point under stress?

3. How could you rally as a team against organizational homeostasis?

Does this Content Resonate?

Every organization has an Antagonist. Most leaders can’t name theirs.

After serving as a founder, facilitator, CEO, and chief of staff over the past 30 years, I know it’s not due to a lack of intelligence. It’s due to a lack of visibility.

So I built a short assessment to help you find it. In eight questions and less than 5 minutes, you’ll get a sense of where the friction in your organization is coming from. After that, if you like, we can jump on a free 30-minute call to discuss more.

Take the 5-minute assessment →

Photo by Jisang Jung on Unsplash

One of my younger brothers is in B2B sales. He’s really good at it and is often recruited by Fortune 100 companies that want to throw him ungodly amounts of money. He has a gift for turning relationships into revenue without it being gross. I joke with him that if I had his skills in making money with my knack for saving it, I’d have a chance at being wealthy.

For people in sales like my brother, including for many senior executive roles, it’s typical to incentivize top talent with financial bonuses, revenue share, profit share, and more. Providing financial incentives is a smart way to keep people motivated, contributing to what matters, and increasing the right employee retention. When done well, it also helps organizations navigate labor costs (pay the best, better) and set aligned goals. There is ample research suggesting that financial incentives significantly affect motivation and performance.

But for companies and teams that don’t provide these financial bonus options, and the nonprofits that are reluctant to think this way, the incentives start to look radically different. Even in sales-centric cultures with financial incentive packages, these alone do not ensure meaningful alignment or shared success. While helpful tools like Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), Management by Objectives (MBOs), and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), among others, bring clarity and focus, they do not solve for incentives.

Like you and me, the Antagonist likes incentives. When behavior is rewarded, more of that behavior will continue. We didn’t need Ivan Pavlov’s dog to teach us that, but we know what to call it.

Take a look at the apps on your phone. Most of them are designed not to minimize how much time you spend using them, but to increase your usage. Doom scrolling is not a flaw; it’s a feature. The app developers, and financial systems behind them, are incentivized to monetize your attention. But you knew that.

As with most Antagonists, when it comes to incentives, it’s what’s under the surface that needs a better look. The answer isn’t misalignment versus alignment, individualism versus culture, or motivation versus values. The Antagonist for incentives is implicit incentives: the rewards that go unnamed but everyone responds to.

Organizations have two incentive systems. The first is the formal one: compensation plans, bonus structures, performance reviews, MBOs, OKRs, KPIs. This is the system you can point to, document, and defend. The second is the real one. The real incentive system answers different questions like:

• Who matters?

• Who gets promoted or protected?

• Who shapes where we’re going?

• Who defines what success looks like?

• Who can fail safely?

• Who gets labeled “difficult,” “not a team player,” or “high maintenance”?

These incentives aren’t showing up on the employee intranet that everyone forgot how to access, but they are learned quickly. And once learned, they shape behavior more powerfully than any dashboard.

This is why implicit incentives are such a dangerous Antagonist.

Because people do what’s rewarded and avoid what isn’t. They notice that speaking up might result in fewer meeting invites. They notice when speed matters more than quality. They notice when loyalty to a person matters more than loyalty to the whole. They notice when risk is celebrated in language but punished in practice. They notice when the work they produce matters differently from the work others produce.

And once those lessons are learned, the incentive system is set, whether you intended it or not.

This is why adding more incentives rarely fixes the problem. You can layer on bonuses, redesign scorecards, or introduce new frameworks, but none of that matters if the implicit incentives remain untouched.

Leaders who want healthier incentive systems make the invisible visible. They name the real incentives out loud. They close the gap between what they praise and what they promote. They ensure that the behaviors required for the future aren’t penalized by the past.

The Antagonist is already at work. Are you?

Three Questions for Confronting This Antagonist

1. What behavior is most rewarded in your organization, regardless of what the metrics say?

2. Where do people play it safe because the real cost of failure is unclear?

3. How could you rally as a team against implicit incentives?

Does this Content Resonate?

Every organization has an Antagonist. Most leaders can’t name theirs.

After serving as a founder, facilitator, CEO, and chief of staff over the past 30 years, I know it’s not due to a lack of intelligence. It’s due to a lack of visibility.

So I built a short assessment to help you find it. In eight questions and less than 5 minutes, you’ll get a sense of where the friction in your organization is coming from. After that, if you like, we can jump on a free 30-minute call to discuss more.

Take the 5-minute assessment →

Photo by Tsuyoshi Kozu on Unsplash

If you’ve been working at the same company or in the same industry for any length of time, a recurring reflex in most organizations is around the idea of “that’s how we’ve always done it.” Whether this is a nod to tradition (the president always sends a holiday greeting in December) or an excuse for habitual defaults (we always meet at that time for the Monday Morning Start), doing it the way you’ve done it can feel normal, natural, even necessary. Why buck the system if it’s working?

I love change. I’m the kid who rearranged his bedroom way too often just because I wanted some variety. This isn’t a productivity argument because, as we are learning, the Antagonist is usually not that obvious.

Founded in 1888, Kodak built an empire by teaching people what to photograph and how to remember their lives. They made memory-keeping a global phenomenon. With slogans like “Let Kodak tell the story,” “You press the button, we do the rest,” and “Kodak moments,” they introduced a new way to capture and communicate life that could be shared for generations.

But Kodak had a difficult time separating the business they were in from how they made money. People weren’t paying for memory capture; they were paying for cameras, film, and film development. Why would Kodak want digital cameras when they make so much of their money on film and film development? Much like Blockbuster and the storefront movie rental behemoth they became, Blockbuster made most of its money on late fees. Why would Blockbuster go into the DVD-by-mail or streaming business, where you can’t charge people late fees?

Kodak invented the first digital camera in 1975, but did little with it because it would cannibalize the business they thought they were in. In 2000, Blockbuster passed on its opportunity to buy Netflix for $50 million.

Neither of these infamous corporate stories is unfamiliar, or even hostage to “that’s how we’ve always done it” mentality. I think it’s deeper. “That’s how we’ve always done it” is a phrase we use when we don’t know how to name what’s underneath.

What’s underneath is identity.

Kodak didn’t just sell film. Kodak believed it was film. Blockbuster didn’t just rent movies. Blockbuster believed it was the place people went to get movies. And once a company confuses its method for its mission, it stops adapting. It starts defending.

This is why those stories feel inevitable in hindsight. The leaders weren’t lazy. They weren’t stupid. They were faithful to a doctrine that had worked.

Kodak invented the first digital camera in 1975 and then treated it like a threat. It could have been an engine. Blockbuster passed on buying Netflix because it couldn’t imagine entertainment without a store, and because its most profitable revenue stream (late fees) didn’t survive in the world that was coming.

These were failures of imagination under the weight of past success.

The late Chris Argyris gave leaders a useful distinction for moments like this. He called it double-loop learning: the ability to question not just the organization’s methods, but also the assumptions, goals, and beliefs beneath them.

Single-loop learning asks, How do we do this better? Double-loop learning asks, Should we still be doing this at all?

That second question is where organizations panic because it threatens more than strategy. It threatens status. It threatens competence. It threatens the story leaders have told themselves about why they’re winning.

In situations like Kodak or Blockbuster, their strategies had worked so well for so long. What began as a playbook became a belief system. And once a strategy becomes doctrine, it stops being tested and starts being protected.

That hardened strategy is the Antagonist because it’s familiar, proven, and probably once saved you. It quietly turns yesterday’s success into today’s ceiling.

The Antagonist is rarely the external disruption. It’s the internal refusal to reinterpret what disruption means. It’s the instinct to optimize the past rather than interrogate it.

Maybe you don’t need more innovation. Maybe you need more courage to ask better questions.

The Antagonist is already at work. Are you?

Three Questions for Confronting This Antagonist

1. What “best practice” in your organization has quietly become doctrine?

2. What assumption are you protecting because it has always worked?

3. How could you rally as a team against your current strategy?

Does this Content Resonate?

Every organization has an Antagonist. Most leaders can’t name theirs.

After serving as a founder, facilitator, CEO, and chief of staff over the past 30 years, I know it’s not due to a lack of intelligence. It’s due to a lack of visibility.

So I built a short assessment to help you find it. In eight questions and less than 5 minutes, you’ll get a sense of where the friction in your organization is coming from. After that, if you like, we can jump on a free 30-minute call to discuss more.

Take the 5-minute assessment →

Photo by Supradoc on Unsplash

There’s a version of leadership wisdom that insists conflict should be resolved quickly. Name it, smooth it over, get back to some form of agreement. Mature cultures seek harmony and treat tension like a bug, not a feature.

I don’t buy it. Some of the most formative counterforces in organizational history were not destroyed, but followed. The story of the Dassler brothers—Adi and Rudi—is one of those uncomfortable examples.

In Herzogenaurach, a small German town divided by a river, the split between the Dassler brothers began with suspicion. During World War II, a misunderstood remark in an air-raid shelter was taken personally, deepening fractures already forming from differences in temperament and wartime tensions. By 1948, the brothers’ shoe factory partnership was over. The town became divided; families, factories, even friendships aligned with one brother or the other. Adi turned inward to perfect the product; Rudi turned outward to conquer the market. What began as a breakdown became a boundary, and that boundary became the line each would spend a lifetime trying to outrun.

When the brothers split, the result was two companies—Adidas and Puma—each driven by a singular need to outdo the other.

The Adi and Rudi story includes an Antagonist that is personal, familial, and identity-laden. Each brother became the other’s reference point. The rival. The foil. The force against which the future emerged.

The Antagonist clarified who each company was becoming, and who it could not be.

This is where it gets uncomfortable, and understandably so. Family rivalry feels like the wrong moral lesson. No one wants to argue that broken relationships are a prerequisite for greatness. I’m not arguing that either. I’m arguing something narrower. And harder.

The Antagonist was already there.

Adi and Rudi didn’t seek rivalry to become successful. They were together in business for 30 years before World War II interfered. But their rivalry revealed a divergence that had been present all along. Different instincts. Different orientations. Different ways to win. Once that Antagonist surfaced, the system reorganized around it.

What’s easily missed in the Dassler story is not that antagonism existed, but that each brother followed it to its logical conclusion. They allowed the tension to pull them toward differentiation instead of forcing reconciliation for its own sake. The Antagonist became directional.

That’s the part leaders tend to avoid.

In organizations, antagonists often show up as people we struggle with. Partners who frustrate us. Executives whose instincts consistently oppose ours. Founders who pull in a different direction. We label these dynamics as problems to fix instead of signals to interpret.

But sometimes the Antagonist is right in front of us, pointing toward our future.

The danger is unexamined rivalry.

When antagonism remains unnamed, it turns toxic. When it is acknowledged and followed with discipline, it can become fuel. In the Dassler case, the Antagonist sharpened identity, accelerated innovation, and produced two enduring shoe brands.

In the Dassler story, the Antagonist was the other brother. That doesn’t mean every conflict should end in separation. The Dassler brothers could have reconciled rather than wait for their sons to do so a generation later.

The Antagonist can emerge as a fault line of difference, where values, instincts, and visions diverge. Ignore it, and it will work anyway, just underground.

Engage with it honestly, and it may reveal what you’re actually building.

The Antagonist is already at work. Are you?

Three Questions for Confronting This Antagonist

1. Who functions as an Antagonist in your leadership story, not as an enemy, but as a clarifying force?

2. If this Antagonist were directional rather than disruptive, where might it be pointing?

3. How could you rally as a team against unexamined rivalry?

Does this Content Resonate?

Every organization has an Antagonist. Most leaders can’t name theirs.

After serving as a founder, facilitator, CEO, and chief of staff over the past 30 years, I know it’s not due to a lack of intelligence. It’s due to a lack of visibility.

So I built a short assessment to help you find it. In eight questions and less than 5 minutes, you’ll get a sense of where the friction in your organization is coming from. After that, if you like, we can jump on a free 30-minute call to discuss more.

Take the 5-minute assessment →

Photo by Kajetan Powolny on Unsplash

Oft-repeated advice to senior leaders centers on alignment. Weekly meetings designed to sync, off-sites meant to integrate, and goals oriented toward a common target. When organizations struggle, the absence of alignment is blamed for silos, competing agendas, and aimless outcomes.

The popular cures are familiar: find consensus that can be committed to, break down silos, eliminate conflicting incentives, and resolve ambiguity at the top. In extreme cases, misalignment is treated as a leadership failure requiring reorganization or replacement.

The hard work of alignment matters. In his book, Re:Align, Jonathan Trevor makes the case that organizations should pursue alignment as a proactive strategy, rather than a reactive response to a failed one. He’s right. Alignment is coordinated commitment in the presence of difference.

But the Antagonist for alignment is sneaky. It often looks like consensus or disagreement. Sometimes it looks like misalignment or missed goals. But the real Antagonist of alignment is together. Together is the language of corporate community. It sounds healthy. It feels mature. It signals unity, cohesion, and shared purpose. But togetherness is not the same thing as alignment. It’s the misnomer that everyone is in. Together can feel like harmony, consensus, and even robust disagreement.

But together is a trap, especially for senior leaders. Whether it’s building or keeping a great company culture, presenting a unified front to customers or stakeholders, or going to bed at night with the comfort of congenial conciliation, this Antagonist must be confronted.

Together can exist without trust. Together can survive with or without clarity. Together can even coexist with disagreement.

In his 2016 letter to Amazon shareholders, Jeff Bezos articulated what has since become a widely quoted phrase: disagree and commit.

What makes the idea powerful is the discipline that follows disagreement: commitment.

But there is something deeper in Bezos’s insight. Disagree and commit only works if disagreement is real. And real disagreement requires differentiated perspectives. Without that, commitment is just compliance dressed up as unity.

This is where togetherness quietly undermines alignment.

In Failure of Nerve, Edwin H. Friedman argues that anxious systems over-focus on techniques, consensus, and sensitivity, rather than on leaders who take responsibility for their own clarity and direction. Friedman contends that healthy leadership is not consensus-driven but differentiated. A leader who knows where they stand, stays connected to others, and resists the pressure to disappear into togetherness when anxiety rises.

Alignment does not begin with agreement. It begins with leaders who are willing to be distinct.

This is why togetherness is such a powerful Antagonist. It offers the comfort of belonging without the cost of conviction. It allows organizations to feel aligned without ever being tested by real difference.

Organizations don’t lose alignment because people disagree. They lose it because distinct disagreement is softened to preserve harmony.

True alignment is people moving in the same direction without needing to stand in the same place.

Togetherness feels good. Alignment does something.

The Antagonist is already at work. Are you?

Three Questions for Confronting This Antagonist

1. How does the language of togetherness mislead your organization?

2. What does the differentiated perspective of the senior leader look like?

3. How could you rally as a team against the illusion of togetherness?

Does this Content Resonate?

Every organization has an Antagonist. Most leaders can’t name theirs.

After serving as a founder, facilitator, CEO, and chief of staff over the past 30 years, I know it’s not due to a lack of intelligence. It’s due to a lack of visibility.

So I built a short assessment to help you find it. In eight questions and less than 5 minutes, you’ll get a sense of where the friction in your organization is coming from. After that, if you like, we can jump on a free 30-minute call to discuss more.

Take the 5-minute assessment →

Photo by Mateusz Tworuszka on Unsplash

“There are very few bold plans that get me nervous. But this one is just too risky.” I love hearing these kinds of responses to the work I get to do with executive leaders. This is different from whiteboard moments, crazy ideas, or daydreaming. Those are made for reactions like this. But synthesize a real plan with real opportunities and implications, and it’s going to stir the nerves.

That nervous ‘butterfly’ energy is often dismissed as weakness. But it’s one of the clearest signals that something real is at stake.

Andy Grove liked to say that “only the paranoid survive,” and nowhere is that clearer than in the story of how he led Intel through its most terrifying strategic turning point. In the 1980s, Intel’s identity and revenue were built on memory chips, but Japanese competitors were relentlessly undercutting them and steadily eroding their margins and market share, even as Intel still had plants, plans, and products on the shelves. Grove describes the gnawing sense of dread he felt, the realization that if they stayed the course, Intel would slowly bleed out, not as a reason to back off their strategy, but as proof that the world had already changed and that clinging to the familiar would be fatal.

That terror became a signal, not a stop sign: he and CEO Gordon Moore made the agonizing decision to exit the very business that had made Intel famous and to bet the company on microprocessors instead. It was a choice that felt like jumping off a cliff with a partially built parachute, but that decision, born in fear and executed with conviction, is what transformed Intel from a vulnerable memory manufacturer into the dominant engine of the PC revolution.

Now, decades later, Intel finds itself at another crucible moment. Whether today’s leadership treats the unease they face as a jump scare, a warning sign, or a catalyst remains to be seen.

I heard an interview with Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal of Acquired podcast fame. When discussing some of the work that goes into preparing for each of their episodic corporate storytelling deep dives, they said that terror is a major factor as they get closer to the moment of recording.

Terror can be a powerful Antagonist.

Not because it paralyzes, but because it clarifies. Terror shows up when the old map no longer fits the terrain, when the organization is still operating as if yesterday’s assumptions hold, even as reality has moved on.

Most teams treat that feeling as a flaw to overcome or a risk to manage away. The better ones learn to read it. Butterflies are not proof that the plan is wrong; they are often evidence that the plan might have just enough audacity to matter.

The question is not whether you feel terror. The question is what you do with it.

Ignore it, and you will preserve comfort at the cost of relevance. Listen to it, and terror becomes a signal, one that points toward the decisions that actually matter, the ones that reshape identity, strategy, and trajectory.

The Antagonist rarely announces itself loudly. Sometimes it arrives as a tightening in the chest, a sense that this choice matters more than you’d like. Teams that learn to trust that signal don’t eliminate fear. They convert it into conviction.

The Antagonist is already at work. Are you?

Three Questions for Confronting This Antagonist

1. Where does fear show up and how quickly do you try to silence it?

2. What decision feels too risky precisely because it would force you to abandon something familiar?

3. How could you rally as a team against areas that lack a little fear and trembling?

Does this Content Resonate?

Every organization has an Antagonist. Most leaders can’t name theirs.

After serving as a founder, facilitator, CEO, and chief of staff over the past 30 years, I know it’s not due to a lack of intelligence. It’s due to a lack of visibility.

So I built a short assessment to help you find it. In eight questions and less than 5 minutes, you’ll get a sense of where the friction in your organization is coming from. After that, if you like, we can jump on a free 30-minute call to discuss more.

Take the 5-minute assessment →

Photo by Risto Kokkonen on Unsplash

“Can’t we just have peace in the land?” This executive’s exasperation was innocent enough, but I couldn’t let it linger. “No sir, that is not your measure for success.” Behind his cry was an appeal for calm, comfort, and confidence that what he is leading and the way his organization operates is actually working. Fair enough, but dig a little deeper, and that pursuit becomes a desert mirage. A fantasy that feels fun to flirt with, but leads to an even deeper appetite for what will always remain elusive, especially at levels of executive leadership.

When calm becomes an aim for customer comments or a company’s culture, the Antagonist is winning, not you. Successful organizations do not succeed by avoiding chaos; they succeed by being willing to disrupt calm.

In the mid-2000s, Nokia was the undisputed global leader in mobile phones. Internally, the company culture was described as disciplined, deferential, and fearful of sharing difficult opinions or feedback, especially upward. This had the appearance of calm. Meetings were orderly because everyone was focused on what was discussed, not what needed to be discussed. Concerns were filtered carefully upward because the backlash from bad news could be brutal. Demotions and firings were commonplace.

After Apple’s iPhone launch in 2007, Nokia’s engineers saw the threat. Middle managers sensed the risk. Senior leaders, however, experienced calm. Market share was still strong. Revenue still looked healthy. The organization felt “under control.”

Post-mortems later revealed a culture where:

• Leaders asked for solutions, not problems.

• Dissent was interpreted as disloyalty.

• Conflict was managed out of the room before it reached the top.

A similar story played out at Boeing in the years leading up to the 737 MAX crisis. Boeing’s executive culture was widely described as controlled and confident. Financial targets were met. Schedules were tight. Concerns from engineers were escalated but repeatedly reframed to avoid disruption. The leadership experience remained calm even as the system beneath it grew brittle.

Nokia and Boeing did not fail because they lacked intelligence. They failed because calm was a signal of success. By the time urgency broke through the surface, the ground had already shifted.

Organizations that are experiencing the comforts that come with calm—hitting goals, retaining top talent, celebrating happy customers—should go deeper. Calm is the question, not the conclusion.

What tensions have been resolved too quickly? What contradictions are being smoothed over? What truths are being withheld in the name of stability?

Healthy organizations know how to use friction as a source of focus. They create space for disagreement before it becomes rupture. They surface risk while it is still theoretical, not catastrophic.

The Antagonist does not announce itself with chaos. It whispers through comfort. Leaders who learn to listen before the noise arrives discover that calm, properly disturbed, can become a productive force for good.

Calm is not the enemy because it is wrong. It is the enemy because it is insufficient. Treated as a signal rather than a destination, calm can become the starting point for clarity, alignment, and renewal. But only if leaders are willing to disturb it. On purpose.

The Antagonist is already at work. Are you?

Three Questions for Confronting This Antagonist

1. Where does stability feel earned, and where does it feel uncomfortable?

2. What conflict would you invite, assuming history will be kind to any backlash

3. How could you rally as a team against areas of stability?

Does this Content Resonate?

Every organization has an Antagonist. Most leaders can’t name theirs.

After serving as a founder, facilitator, CEO, and chief of staff over the past 30 years, I know it’s not due to a lack of intelligence. It’s due to a lack of visibility.

So I built a short assessment to help you find it. In eight questions and less than 5 minutes, you’ll get a sense of where the friction in your organization is coming from. After that, if you like, we can jump on a free 30-minute call to discuss more.

Take the 5-minute assessment →

Photo by Boris Misevic on Unsplash

Whether it’s the new employee figuring out how everything works or the long-time one who already knows, both are wise to keep a pulse on who’s in charge. Knowing where colleagues are on the org chart speaks to where priority should be given, who to give the nicer gift to, and where power really lies. Or so we’re led to believe.

While some organizations are less hierarchy-oriented than others, most still rely on a classic model of power being distributed from the top. Even in flatter organizations, in a socioacracy (decentralized, nested roles and circles), or in an agile networked context, power still comes from a source (e.g., board, stakeholders, owners) and is given to others.

Working closely with so many different kinds of senior leaders over the years, it’s easy to contrast clear and commanding direction with someone who is more collaborative, deferential, and trusting. Both extremes have their champions and challengers. And when it comes to this person being at the top of the org chart, for those downline, both approaches offer dramatically different ways to make decisions, measure effectiveness, and know where you stand.

And that difference is why hierarchy is such a reliable hiding place. Hierarchy gives people a clean excuse: “I’m just doing what I’m told.” It gives the senior leader a clean excuse, too: “That’s how the system works.”

Org charts are comforting because they feel like clarity. Boxes. Lines. Titles. Reporting relationships. A visible architecture of who answers to whom. For anxious systems, the org chart becomes a map that gives the illusion of certainty in a world that isn’t flat.

But the org chart is not the organization.

Reality is shaped by the person everyone goes to when something breaks.

Reality is shaped by who can say “no” without consequences.

Reality is shaped by who controls attention, resources, and risk.

Hierarchy claims to distribute power. In practice, it often disguises itself as process.

I’ve watched this play out in organizations that are deeply hierarchical and those that swear they aren’t. In the hierarchical ones, the dysfunction is obvious: layers, approvals, gatekeepers, slow decisions, political survival. In the flatter or more distributed ones, the dysfunction is subtler: invisible power, unclear accountability, and a culture that pretends hierarchy doesn’t exist while punishing anyone who names it.

Either way, hierarchy becomes the Antagonist when it stops being a tool and becomes a refuge. It becomes the place where leaders go to avoid responsibility and where teams go to avoid ownership. A common phrase in a hierarchy is: “That’s above my pay grade.”

And sometimes that sentiment is true. But more often, it’s a socially acceptable way to say, “Don’t attach my name to the outcome.”

Hierarchy is brilliant at absorbing risk. It gives organizations a way to move accountability upward until it disappears into a meeting nobody knows about, a leader who is too busy, or a decision that is never actually made. It creates a system where everyone can stay employed while nothing truly changes.

This is why org charts are so addictive in moments of uncertainty. When things feel unstable—missed numbers, shifting strategy, internal conflict, a leadership transition—the instinct is to redraw the boxes. Reassign reporting lines. Rename roles. Promote someone. Move a function.

But restructuring is not leadership.

Hierarchy is supposed to create speed, clarity, and coordination. When it becomes an Antagonist, it produces the opposite: hesitation, confusion, and distance.

The point here isn’t to abolish hierarchy but to stop defaulting to it. Org charts are useful, but they are not neutral.

They either clarify responsibility or they provide cover from it.

They either speed up decisions or they become a place to hide them.

They either serve the mission or quietly subvert it.

The Antagonist is already at work. Are you?

Three Questions for Confronting This Antagonist

1. Where is hierarchy being used as an excuse instead of a tool?

2. Where is there unclear ownership or responsibility, and what does that stem from?

3. How could you rally as a team against org-chart thinking?

Does this Content Resonate?

Every organization has an Antagonist. Most leaders can’t name theirs.

After serving as a founder, facilitator, CEO, and chief of staff over the past 30 years, I know it’s not due to a lack of intelligence. It’s due to a lack of visibility.

So I built a short assessment to help you find it. In eight questions and less than 5 minutes, you’ll get a sense of where the friction in your organization is coming from. After that, if you like, we can jump on a free 30-minute call to discuss more.

Take the 5-minute assessment →

Photo by Danist Soh on Unsplash

History does not favor calm consensus. It turns on tension, fracture, and fight. In a small German town, the Dassler brothers’ famous feud led to the creation of two rival brands—Puma and Adidas—dividing a workforce, a river, and even the way neighbors crossed the street. When Coke was caught off guard by the infamous “Pepsi Challenge,” it forced a reckoning with the story it had told itself for so long, that people prefer what they know rather than what they like. A young American nation nearly split in two because one half’s identity was at war with the other half’s ideology. The costs are still being paid today. In 1054, a mutual excommunication hardened theological tension into a permanent scar, splitting Christianity into East and West and shaping nations, liturgies, and loyalties for a thousand years.

Conflict is not a footnote to history; it is the engine. When pressure meets conviction, something breaks. And what emerges on the other side is never neutral.

Scratch the surface of any boardroom, conference room, or Zoom room, and the same forces are at work shaping decisions and outcomes: conflict, contradiction, and contrarian thinking. For executives and teams who know how to harness the power of the Antagonist, the future is theirs for the taking. For most, the Antagonist remains in the shadows: too risky to name, too disruptive to confront, too costly to activate.

The fastest way to align a group is to show them what must be overcome.

Organizations do not mobilize around abstract ideas. They might organize around mission statements, operating plans, and goals, but those are incomplete. If you want momentum, unity, and urgency, something must be overcome. A clearly named Antagonist reveals the common enemy for the common good.

Antagonist at Work is written for leaders who want to understand what they are up against, what they are fighting, and what is worth fighting for.

This is not about villainizing competitors, though competition matters. It is about the forces within and without that resist progress: habits, incentives, systems, stories, complacency, and contradictions that slow momentum.

The Antagonist is an organizing force. When named clearly, it sharpens strategy, clarifies identity, and rallies teams toward action. When left unnamed, it shapes culture anyway through drift, stagnation, and decay.

This content examines culture, schisms, struggles, and corporate conundrums with an eye toward what leaders can learn from them. Antagonist at Work explores how systems form, how strategies harden, how incentives distort, and how institutions fall back to familiar set points.

Leadership is not the elimination of antagonists. It is the discipline of naming them, aiming them, and preventing them from turning into scapegoats.

The Antagonist at Work is rarely a person and almost always a force. At first glance, it may look appealing because who doesn’t appreciate stability, tradition, alignment, loyalty, and growth? But look closer, and it may be quietly restraining the very progress you seek.

You can try to avoid it, bury it, or plan around it. But those efforts are futile. For those with the courage to face the opposition, the Antagonist becomes the driver of clarity, courage, and progress. Ignore it, and it will shape you anyway. Just without your consent.

The Antagonist is already at work. Are you?

Three Questions for Confronting This Antagonist

1. What force inside your organization currently absorbs the most energy, but is rarely named?

2. If this Antagonist were made explicit, what decision would immediately become unavoidable?

3. How could you rally as a team against a force you have not named yet?

Does this Content Resonate?

Every organization has an Antagonist. Most leaders can’t name theirs.

After serving as a founder, facilitator, CEO, and chief of staff over the past 30 years, I know it’s not due to a lack of intelligence. It’s due to a lack of visibility.

So I built a short assessment to help you find it. In eight questions and less than 5 minutes, you’ll get a sense of where the friction in your organization is coming from. After that, if you like, we can jump on a free 30-minute call to discuss more.

Take the 5-minute assessment →

Photo by Donea Constantin on Unsplash

“Where there is no conflict,
there is no movement.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The fastest way to align a group is to show them what must be overcome.

Organizations do not mobilize around abstract ideas. They can organize around mission statements, operating plans, and goals, but those are incomplete. If you want momentum, unity, and urgency, something must be overcome. A clearly named Antagonist reveals the common enemy for the common good.

Antagonist at Work is written for leaders who want to understand what they are up against, what they are fighting, and what is worth fighting for.

This is not about villainizing competitors, though competition matters. It is about the forces within and without that resist progress: habits, incentives, systems, stories, complacency, and contradictions that slow momentum.

The Antagonist is an organizing force. When named clearly, it sharpens strategy, clarifies identity, and rallies teams toward action. When left unnamed, it shapes culture anyway through drift, stagnation, and decay.

This content examines culture, schisms, struggles, and corporate conundrums with an eye toward what leaders can learn from them. Antagonist at Work explores how systems form, how strategies harden, how incentives distort, and how institutions fall back to familiar set points.

Leadership is not the elimination of antagonists. It is the discipline of naming them, aiming them, and preventing them from turning into scapegoats.

The Antagonist at Work is rarely a person and almost always a force. At first glance, it may look appealing because who doesn’t appreciate stability, tradition, alignment, loyalty, and growth? But look closer, and it may be quietly restraining the very progress you seek.

You can try to avoid it, bury it, or plan around it. But those efforts are futile. For those with the courage to face the opposition, the Antagonist becomes the driver of clarity, courage, and progress. Ignore it, and it will shape you anyway. Just without your consent.

The Antagonist is already at work. Are you?

Does this Content Resonate?

Every organization has an Antagonist. Most leaders can’t name theirs.

After serving as a founder, facilitator, CEO, and chief of staff over the past 30 years, I know it’s not due to a lack of intelligence. It’s due to a lack of visibility.

So I built a short assessment to help you find it. In eight questions and less than 5 minutes, you’ll get a sense of where the friction in your organization is coming from. After that, if you like, we can jump on a free 30-minute call to discuss more.

Take the 5-minute assessment →