🔵 Why do so many leaders discover crises only when it’s already too late?

In 2024, PwC revealed that 45% of CEOs believe their companies will no longer be viable within ten years without profound transformation.

Yet never before have leaders had access to so much data, reporting, and so many dashboards.

So the problem isn’t a lack of information.

It’s often a lack of truth.

At Boeing, before the 737 MAX crisis, several engineers had raised concerns.

The warning signs were there.

They simply weren’t heard.

At Volkswagen before Dieselgate.

At Wells Fargo before the fake accounts scandal.

Even at OpenAI.

Sam Altman’s unexpected ouster in late 2023 stunned Silicon Valley.

Just days later, his return exposed deeper fractures: competing visions, power struggles, shifting alliances, and governance under strain.

The most advanced AI in the world.

Yet human dynamics that neither algorithms nor models could resolve.

Because the higher you rise, the more something changes.

People protect you.

They filter information.

Bad news gets delayed.

Messages get adjusted.

Confrontation is avoided.

And sometimes, people simply remain silent.

A Harvard Business Review study had already found that more than one executive out of two experiences loneliness in the role.

But the issue runs deeper.

A leader’s true loneliness isn’t psychological.

It’s behavioral.

I have seen CEOs discover that their executive committees had been fractured for months.

Chairmen learn from customers what their own teams no longer dared to tell them.

“Obvious” successors quietly rejected by the board.

Number twos building their own influence networks without ever openly challenging the leader.

Everything seemed to be working.

Until the day it wasn’t.

Because major crises rarely emerge without weak signals.

But weak signals have one defining characteristic:

They don’t show up in any KPI.

They’re absent from reports.

You won’t find them in Excel or PowerPoint.

They hide in the silences.

In what goes unsaid.

In shifting loyalties.

In rivalries.

In conversations that never take place.

And perhaps that is the greatest loneliness of power.

Being surrounded by thousands of data points…

yet lacking someone capable of showing you what no one else dares to say.

#HumintAdvisory