As an executive, you are mystified by the source of corporate failures. How does a well-managed company make bad decisions that run the firm out of business? Do you lack insider information? Or was the system actually designed to generate the wrong outcome?
In these cases, it wasn’t ignorance. Or arrogance. Or even rotten luck. The team was proficiently trained and highly respected in local circles.
Yet, in retrospect, the mistakes were obvious.
Sometimes smart people help create a system that meets all its metrics, appears to be progressing, but sows the seeds of its own destruction. Here is an example.
The NCAA vs. MVP
The pattern shows up in sports organisations. Jamaica’s MVP Track Club has produced some of our greatest sprinters. They didn’t just win races. They built careers that lasted decades.
Meanwhile, the NCAA system – the only route at one time for the country’s athletes – is a graveyard. High school talent burns bright during college then flames out, never to be heard from again. The remarkable fact? NCAA coaches and administrators aren’t incompetent. They are, objectively, some of the best in the world. They also don’t lack resources. Billion-dollar programmes fuel their analysis of tracked metrics.
It remains a system optimised to win championships, generate revenue, secure funding, and deploy talent. And … destroy the very athletes who make those results possible.
Incredibly, MVP looked at the same raw talent and built something completely different.
Co-founder Stephen Francis and his team posed a question the NCAA system never bothered to ask: “What does winning look like if you measure it over a career rather than a season?” The hard answer required the sacrifice of immediate gains: meet victories, rankings, college glamour.
It is not difficult to imagine NCAA schools trying to hire away MVP administrators, coaches, and athletes.
Fortunately, the club has athletes who peak at the Olympics and World Championships, not an NCAA tournament. The approach also enables them to retire with their health intact, sometimes wealthy, and with bodies that still work.
The NCAA doesn’t fail because its people are stupid. They are simply caught in a system that is optimising the wrong definition of winning. And every metric being used probably confirms the design. Right up until the moment when the athlete graduates, broken.
Now here is an uncomfortable question for all CEOs. Is your company winning in an NCAA way?
Local Business Trap
Tales of failed businesses often follow the same pattern. Smart people make decisions that look brilliant on every spreadsheet while quietly destroying the underlying business.
Consider the FINSAC debacle of the 1990s. Before the collapse, all indicators appeared positive. The captains of industry saw nothing but success – right up until they found themselves in grave peril.
The short-term gains were real. But the long-term destruction was already being built – though only visible in retrospect. The prevailing system designed to evaluate success ignored the destruction being created from the very beginning.
Why Smart People Get in Trouble
The NCAA system guarantees failure. Reinstating FINSAC era regulations would do the same. Yet today’s CEOs continue to be judged on quarterly performance rather than long-term health.
And the leader who sacrifices this quarter’s numbers to protect next decade’s foundation doesn’t get applauded – they get questioned.
As such, this is not a failure of intelligence. Or discipline. Or execution.
The answer is to develop profound corporate strategy, where existential questions are continually raised. Practically, this means using techniques like the following, which are intended to unearth long-term consequences.
Pre-Mortems
During a retreat, the strategy team is given a single instruction: assume the initiative has failed – badly – 15–30 years from now. Write the story of exactly how and why. Not vague organisational hand-wringing. A specific, uncomfortable narrative that traces the chain of outcomes.
The Second-Order Impact Map
Most strategy discussions evaluate first-order effects and stop there. “This pricing move increases margins by 12 per cent.” Meeting adjourned. The second-order map demands continuation. It forces a group to keep pulling the thread until the consequences become uncomfortable enough to change the decision.
The Twenty Years Later Role Play
Someone in the strategy retreat plays the role of the youngest person in attendance. As such, they alone will be attending a similar planning workshop twenty years in the future.
Their peers ask for some history: “What was it like to attend the 2026 session?”
The actor reports two separate scenarios. The first depicts a team selflessly confronting the most challenging questions of the time, making tough trade-offs. The second portrays cowardice, where executives pretended things that weren’t true just in order to keep the peace.
This contrast can generate urgency. The question for every CEO reading this is whether your organisation is unwittingly following the second scenario. Is it running the NCAA playbook, celebrating wins that look spectacular in the moment while quietly destroying the business you are supposed to be building?
The smartest people in the room will keep making the worst decisions until the room itself is redesigned. The techniques exist to choose differently. The choice is yours.
Francis Wade is the author of Perfect Time Based Productivity, a keynote speaker and a management consultant. To search his prior columns on productivity, strategy, engagement, and business processes, send email to columns@fwconsulting.com.
