Most leadership problems exist because leaders avoid tough questions. These 13 systemic questions expose who benefits, what you've normalized, and which values you drop when pressured.
Your system is working exactly as designed. If the same people always benefit and the same people always absorb the cost, that's not an execution problem - that's a design choice. When your Product Manager and stakeholders constantly insert urgent tasks into planned sprints, who wins? Who pays? The article forces you to name it: benefits flow up, costs flow down, and calling it "just how things work" doesn't make it less deliberate.
The questions get more uncomfortable from there. What did you normalize that would have shocked you two years ago? Slow delivery, meetings replacing decisions, ignoring OKRs, high attrition. If you're calling it "the new reality," that's exactly when you need to answer. Which value drops first when things get tight - quality, transparency, autonomy, safety? Values only exist when they cost something. Everything else is a poster on the wall.
The most powerful question might be the personal one: what part of you is keeping this problem alive? The part that needs certainty, avoids conflict, wants to be needed, hates being wrong. Your org can't outgrow the leader you protect. When you can't delegate because no one does it at your level of quality, when you fear engineers talking to clients, when you accept bad relationships as unchangeable facts - you're the constraint. The article argues that resistance from your best engineers isn't defiance, it's data. They're pushing back because they see risks you don't want to face.
The framework shifts from firefighting to redesign. Ask where the problem doesn't happen in your org - somewhere, the desired state already exists. Why are you treating that as an exception instead of a guide? If nothing changes, how long until your best people leave, emotionally or literally? If you can see the timeline, it's no longer abstract. When on-calls wake people up multiple times per night, when employees keep asking about transparency, when the system hits technical scaling limits with no discussion - the countdown has started.
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