Letter 01 · 26 June 2026
The moment the phone rings
There is a moment when the phone usually rings.
It is rarely at the start of a programme. Almost never when everything is going to plan. It rings when an organisation is competent — but uneasy.
Here is what the calls actually sound like. Things are busy — that word always comes early. We need someone who can get the programme under control. And sometimes, before the call is over, an instruction arrives wrapped as a remark: don't rock the boat.
Here is what no one says. In thirty years of these calls, no one has ever said: "We are no longer sure what the right next step is."
They do not say it even when it is true. They do not say it even though it is, almost always, the first thing I will have to find out.
That silence is worth pausing on. In a large programme, some sentences quietly become expensive. The more that has been invested, the more prestige that has been staked, the more it costs to say we do not know — in the programme's own steering room and, it turns out, even on the phone to an outsider. The price of the sentence travels down the line.
So I have learned to read the call instead of the words. A competent organisation does not lack grip — grip is what it has most of. When people like that reach outside for control, control is not what is missing. What is missing is the sentence they could not say: what the right next step is. That is not a competence problem. It is a problem of judgment. And no one asks you to steady a boat that is not rocking.
The message is in the gap between what is asked for and what is missing. That gap is the sound of a room beginning to close.
But understand the call for what it is. However it is worded, reaching outside the room is the one honest move available — the admission the room can no longer make in words. The organisations that call are usually standing in the same place: before the crisis, before the headlines, before the irreversible. They call because they want to have been responsible when it counted.
The question is not whether you can continue.
The question is whether you still have the room to choose.
- Søren
Letter 02 · 26 August 2026
The price of truth
Something puzzled me for years in large programmes.
You reach a point where the plan no longer holds — and the programme continues anyway. The comfortable explanation is that nobody could see it. The comfortable explanation is wrong. Someone always sees it.
The room is simply not what it pretends to be. Around the table sit at least four different positions, wearing the same title: steering committee.
There are the people who see it and carry it — usually those closest to the delivery. Their hand is on the hot plate: their name, their accountability. They know first, and they pay most for saying it.
There are the people who see it and play it. Not every hand in the room is on this programme's hot plate — some are on another plate entirely. The supplier who sold fixed price, fixed time, fixed scope, and knows he cannot deliver: whether he says so, or quietly starts raising change requests on everything that could arguably sit outside scope, depends on his integrity and his incentives — and only one of those is reliably present. The executive who already knows he is moving on, and would like the bonus to move with him: every report between now and his exit has one job, and it is not accuracy. Neither of them is confused. They are working.
And there is a quieter figure still: the executive who sees it, carries it — and genuinely believes it will come right. Not because the numbers say so, but because his whole career has taught him that things come right when he is in the room. Hope, in a man formed by success, is indistinguishable from judgment — even to himself.
There are the people who genuinely do not see it — too far from the work, or without the craft to read what sits beneath a traffic-light report. And the people who could see it but make sure they never look, because that is cheaper than lying: you never have to say anything false if you never ask.
And some, let us say it plainly, are lying — and have been since before the room existed. Programmes are regularly won on numbers somebody knew were optimistic. The lie is in the baseline. The research has a polite name for it: strategic misrepresentation.
So yes — truth has a price. But it is not evenly billed. The price of speaking is highest for those who see the most and carry the most; the profit of silence flows to those who carry the least. A room's judgment is not the average of its honesty. It is the distribution of skin.
Here is the uncomfortable part: from inside the room, you usually cannot tell these positions apart. The player, the blind, and the hopeful behave identically — they all support continuation. Motive is private. Which is exactly why the useful question is not about motive at all — and why I distrust the usual one, "does the plan hold?" Everyone knows how to answer that safely.
Ask instead: who in this room pays if this continues wrongly — and who pays if it stops? Map the hands to the hot plates. In healthy programmes, the two lists overlap. In committed ones, they have quietly separated — and the people most able to stop it have the least reason to.
Stakes, unlike intentions, leave a paper trail: contracts, bonus structures, ownership of outcomes. You may never know what a man believes. You can usually find out what he stands to lose.
Competent organisations do not lose their judgment in the crisis. They lose it just before — while the people who saw were paying too much to speak, and the people who spoke were staked on the story, not the outcome.
- Søren