04. Did Anything Change?

Tuesday, 27 January 2026

The most important standard in an organisation is usually the one nobody can explain.

Ask an organisation about its financial standards and the answers come quickly. Ask about quality, safety, engineering, compliance or security and people know where the boundaries are. They know what good looks like. They know what failure looks like. They know what happens when standards are not met.

Ask about leadership and the conversation becomes far less certain.

This is strange when you think about it. Leadership is routinely described as the most important factor in organisational success. Boards discuss it. Executives invest in it. Managers attend courses about it. Entire industries have been built around improving it. Yet very few organisations can clearly explain how leadership itself is judged.

Most rely on vague descriptions. They talk about behaviours, competencies, values and expectations. They describe the kind of leader they would like to have. What they rarely define is the standard by which leadership will be assessed when circumstances become difficult.

That omission matters more than most people realise.

When organisations struggle, they often assume they have a performance problem. Sales are down. Quality is slipping. Deadlines are being missed. Customers are becoming dissatisfied. Performance is visible, so performance becomes the focus.

Often, however, the deeper problem is not performance at all.

It is ambiguity.

People are working hard, but they are not working to the same standard. One manager considers a result acceptable while another does not. One department tolerates behaviour that another would challenge immediately. Effort is praised in one part of the organisation while outcomes matter somewhere else. Everybody believes they are acting reasonably, yet nobody is using precisely the same definition of what good looks like.

Over time, this uncertainty becomes normal. Expectations begin to vary from team to team. Standards become negotiable. Performance becomes increasingly subjective. The organisation starts to operate according to custom and interpretation rather than a shared understanding of what is required.

This is how drift begins.

Not with a dramatic failure.

Not with incompetence.

Not with bad intentions.

With uncertainty.

Imagine a football match without goalposts. Imagine an examination without a marking scheme. Imagine a manufacturing process without tolerances. In every case, people may still work hard and act in good faith. The problem is that nobody can judge the result consistently because nobody has agreed where the boundaries are.

Yet this is exactly how leadership is managed in many organisations.

Leaders are expected to lead, but the standard itself remains undefined. The same decision is praised by one person and criticised by another. The same outcome is considered acceptable in one team and unacceptable in the next. The organisation slowly accumulates multiple standards instead of one.

Eventually, nobody is entirely sure where the line is drawn.

The purpose of a standard is not to inspire people.

It is to remove ambiguity.

A standard defines what is acceptable and what is not. It creates a common language for judgement. It allows people to distinguish between outcomes that are poor, satisfactory, good and Excellent. More importantly, it allows those distinctions to be applied consistently.

Those four words are not complicated.

Everybody understands them.

Everybody can distinguish between them.

The challenge is not understanding the scale. The challenge is applying it honestly.

Most organisations spend their time debating the difference between good and Excellent. The greater danger often lies elsewhere. They stop noticing when poor becomes satisfactory. They become accustomed to standards that would once have been unacceptable. What began as an exception slowly becomes normal.

That is the nature of drift.

A standard exists to prevent it.

This is why genuine standards are rarely comfortable. They remove room for interpretation. They expose inconsistency. They force difficult conversations. They require leaders to challenge behaviour that would otherwise be tolerated. Standards make judgement unavoidable, which is precisely why so many organisations prefer ambiguity.

Ambiguity offers flexibility.

Standards require decisions.

Leadership exists to improve outcomes under real conditions. It exists to prevent the slow drift towards mediocrity that affects every organisation over time. Neither objective can be achieved unless people understand what is expected, what is acceptable and what will be defended when pressure arrives.

Before an organisation can pursue Excellence, it must first define the standard.

Everything else follows from there.