Your Evidence Has a Price, and Someone Else Pays It.

A while ago, in one of the working sessions I run with the Design Mavericks community on Journey Management, someone described a meeting they had just come out of. Strong analysis. Right sponsor in the room. Ninety minutes. Nothing was rejected, and nothing was blocked, and nothing happened, and they could not explain why.

Everyone else in the session recognised it instantly. Nobody could name it either.

I have written around this four times now from different perspectives. Data and journey work in November. Corporate amnesia, two weeks later. Reorgs in December. And the whitepaper with Divya in July. Four subjects. Same thing underneath, which I want to explore for this late-summer piece.

The journey management team believes the dashboard will move the decision. It will not, because the decision was never waiting on evidence in the first place.

The organisation forgets what it tried in 2021. We tend to call it a “documentation problem.” It is not a documentation problem. Remembering assigns blame. Forgetting is cheaper for everyone who is still in the room.

Leadership announces a new structure, explains the logic carefully, gets cynicism back, and concludes they communicated badly. The logic was never the issue. People are not evaluating your structure. They are working out what it costs them.

Finally, the capable director with the strong case and the present sponsor, who leaves the meeting with nothing.

In all four, more information would not have helped. In at least two of them, more information actively made it worse.

Not in budget. In standing.

If accepting your finding requires someone to concede that they were wrong, or that their function has been quietly underperforming for three quarters, or that a decision they defended in front of the board was expensive, then you are not making an evidence argument. You are asking for a transfer of status, in a room full of people who will remember.

People do not lose those arguments. They absorb them. You get warmth, thanks for the work, genuine-sounding interest.

Resistance would be better. Resistance is visible and can be argued with. Agreement gives you nothing to push against and no way to describe what went wrong, which is why people come out of those meetings assuming they must have presented badly.

Three things that help. Roughly in order of how hard they are.

Write down who loses standing if this is accepted. If that is a specific person who will be sitting in the room, you have a sequencing problem, not a slide problem. Go and see them first. In private, the cost of agreeing with you drops considerably, because there is no audience to agree in front of.

Organisations avoid looking at what failed before because looking is functionally indistinguishable from prosecuting.

So try to change the question. Not why did this fail, but what was true then, that is different now. Identical information, no defendant. I put this in the amnesia piece as a line for handling cynics, and I have since come to think it is a more general move.

Every organisation has one logic it treats as beyond argument. Risk in a bank. Safety in a hospital. Delivery in a scale-up, usually. Your finding travels further dressed as that logic than as customer experience.

People hear this as a compromise, and I understand why. Yet, I disagree. It is the difference between being right and being consequential.

Legitimacy is what the system runs on. Refusing to use it is not a question of principle. It is just an expensive way to be ignored, and the bill lands on you rather than on the thing you were trying to change.

On executives who ask for numbers they never act on, and what data can realistically do inside a power structure. This one came out of the community working sessions.

Data will not replace power. But it can make power smarter.

The Loopers, who repeat work because nobody told them it had been done. The Cynics, who remember everything and use it as a shield.

Corporate amnesia is not inevitable. It is a design flaw.

Three snapshots from live reorgs, including one where cost-cutting had eventually become the business model. Also, the moves I coach managers through when the boxes start shifting.

A reorganisation is not about boxes. It is about identity, belonging, influence, pride, fear, hope.

The whitepaper with Divya Balasubramanian. Six tensions modern organisations are living inside all at once, and the argument that organisational sensitivity is a learnable skill rather than a personality trait. Free to download.

The surface of the work looks fine. What runs beneath it decides whether anything moves.

The whitepaper introduces a course of the same name, launching this autumn. By downloading the whitepaper, you automatically join the waiting list.

Download the whitepaper

A note: I scheduled this post at the end of July, before five weeks fully off. Back in September.

Reading a system accurately takes distance, and distance is the one thing a full calendar cannot manufacture. Most of what I understand about how organisations actually work arrived when I was nowhere near one. That is the argument for the break, and it is also why I stopped treating it as something to earn. More on that in Rest Is a Design Decision.

M