Accelerating execution speed by changing the fear of being wrong

A 20,000-person enterprise SaaS company, two decades in, growth slowing. Facing the first real test of whether it could adapt to disruption. Execution was the deciding factor.

Internal Audit named execution speed as the single greatest enterprise risk to the board, during a time of massive transformation and disruption for this 20-year-old company.

Internal research kept landing on the same root: trust had eroded. Execution speed depends on people seeing what matters, acting with confidence, and moving together. None of that was working. Ground truths stayed buried, so nobody had clarity. Self-protection had replaced initiative, so nobody acted with conviction. People had stopped believing good work got rewarded, so coordination collapsed. Underneath all of it, leaders and workmates doubted each other's decisions and commitments.

That showed up as five common patterns slowing execution. Flying blind — employees didn't have the context to act with confidence. Optics over outcomes — energy went into looking aligned, not getting results. Not landing the plane — priorities shifted before work was finished. Scattered accountability — ownership blurred, nobody felt responsible. Silo first — teams optimized for themselves, not the enterprise.

People weren't slow because they were lazy or unskilled. They were slow because being wrong was more expensive than being slow. Twelve people on a routine review weren't bureaucracy. They were insurance. The most negative cohort in the data was the SVP layer — most aware the operating system was failing, most exposed to its politics, unable to escape in either direction.

Rewiring how work happens, with the help of all 20,000 employees. First step was to share the research and name what was slowing us down — in front of all employees, so everyone could see the blockers visibly and have honest conversations about them. Next was asking employees for their ideas rather than assuming we had the answer. They came up with thousands. Each was actioned at the team level, and the biggest themes turned into a handful of changes at the enterprise level. We pushed decisions out of the executive layers. Asked employees to walk out of meetings they weren't adding to — executives started by publicly announcing which three they'd drop each week. All of it embedded into workflow tools like docs and calendar invites, so the right behavior became default.