After three decades in the technology industry, across multiple countries and cultures, I have learned that the way people relate to hierarchy has a huge impact on successful delivery. Some cultures treat hierarchy as a gentle suggestion, while others treat it like the cockpit of a 1970s jumbo jet—the pilot speaks, everyone nods, and nobody mentions they thought they saw smoke coming from engine two.
Someone once told me there are more plane crashes in cultures where hierarchy is strong and top-down, because the co-pilot is too scared to tell the pilot he made a mistake. This principle, if true, applies directly to building software at scale. Enterprise technology is inherently complex; mistakes will happen and should be expected. The key is creating an environment where people feel safe to discuss mistakes openly as learning opportunities, much like pilots debrief after landing.
We must build stage-gates and checklists to mitigate the limitations of any single human brain. No one person can see the entire enterprise, which is why top-down, power-over control-style leadership is a disaster. This does not mean tolerating incompetence—if a software engineer makes 80% mistakes, the real mistake was in hiring. But we should expect roughly 20% mistakes within a framework of good design, clear direction, and checks from experienced technical leaders.
It is well documented that both healthcare and the airline industry understand that a blame culture in complex environments drives mistakes underground. Pilots are encouraged to talk about their errors during landing, and there is a culture of curiosity and continuous improvement. Similarly, surgeons run through a simple checklist before surgery: name, date of birth, left leg. These are highly trained professionals, yet even they benefit from such basic verification steps. As Atul Gawande, surgeon, author, and Harvard professor, explains, even the most expert professionals benefit from checklists. He also notes that the volume and complexity of our knowledge has exceeded our ability to consistently deliver it correctly, safely, or efficiently.
Humans get tunnel vision under pressure—even brain surgeons and pilots. That is the opposite of what we need to solve complex problems. It raises a puzzling question: why don't these complex industries talk to each other more? Why do power-over leaders in technology think that another kick to the team will speed up a troubled project? Why doesn't technology look to aviation and healthcare to understand that pressure, pace, and culture contribute to many errors and budget overruns?
In my personal experience as a head of delivery, for every red project I have picked up—and there have been hundreds—someone deep in the tech team knew something was wrong six months earlier. But they were too unsure or too scared to speak up. Often their thoughts were only half-formed due to pace and complexity—shards of light in the darkness, not complete enough to raise a flag. No one will tell a big, scary executive about their fears in a culture that demands performative confidence and fast-paced cleverness. So everyone smiles and nods in update meetings, while problems compound silently.
Why is a skilled professional's hesitant admission—'I'm not sure, but something's not right'—batted into the long grass? The assumption is that you need to be loud and confident before you raise concerns. By the time you do, the problem has grown and the project is far deeper in the red. Experienced ears probe and listen for patterns of concern—faint signals that are often only communicated in a culture of high trust and psychological safety. These experienced ears catch risk early and follow up with data until certainty emerges.
It takes all my mentoring and coaching to push against prevailing culture and help skilled professionals feel safe enough to share their hunches. My listening skills are at the forefront. Hunches are valuable in complexity because they allow fast action, followed by validation via risk patterns from experience or by consulting a trusted professional. That professional runs an analysis and produces data to prove or disprove the hunch. If wrong, we try again—maybe the issue is in design, maybe testing, maybe data. We gather the skilled professionals, listen, and observe; patterns will emerge. Hunches are discussed respectfully among experienced technology leaders in a flat hierarchy that sees leadership as just another profession. This approach gets to the problems faster and, through collaborative conversation, identifies specifics that lead to solutions. And once we find one problem, we usually uncover two more, as James Reason wrote in 'Human Error': in complex systems, failures result from latent conditions and active failures lining up.
In my experience, what you discover is a scenario where multiple failures point back to decisions made much earlier. For example, high error rates in testing often stem from faulty design decisions. Fixing each test individually without tracing back to the root cause creates a loop of fixing one thing and breaking another. That is why reflective thinking and lessons learned are essential—a topic for another day. Once latent faults and current problems are identified, we apply competency, methods, checkpoints, and experience to dig our way out. The emotionally intelligent 'no' to a client is also a guiding light.
We must build trust with clients by leading conversations about correct methods—like proper design—while simultaneously giving our team the most valuable commodity of all: time to think. Pushing back on well-intentioned but rushed requests, such as a compressed design phase, is part of our job as technology leaders. We sell an intelligent 'yes' and 'no' in equal measure. Meanwhile, millions of pounds are at stake, and lawyers are reaching for their pens. Tech leadership requires courage, resilience, calm, and the role modeling of well-managed uncertainty. Those behaviors are hugely important. Your job as a leader is to find clever people and create good behaviors—not to be the cleverest person in the room with a fragile ego, shouting for a screwdriver to fix everything yourself.
When complex tech goes wrong, culture is often the context that allows latent errors to click into failure. That is a leadership problem.
Source: ComputerWeekly.com News