Most organisations can describe their performance in detail. Fewer can describe whether their people still feel part of what is being built. The difference rarely shows up in a quarterly report, yet it shapes almost everything that follows: who takes initiative, who stays, and who quietly stops contributing more than is required.
This question sat at the centre of a conversation between Stefan Peetroons and Jeroen Spruyt, an executive with long experience of transformation and turnaround. What follows is not a record of that dialogue but a reflection on the ideas it opened.
Running is not the same as living
An organisation can function like a well-maintained machine. Processes run, targets are met, money is made. Nothing is visibly broken. And still something is missing: people execute without ownership, raise concerns without being heard, and stop offering the discretionary effort that turns a plan into momentum.
The contrast becomes clear when the opposite happens. When people recognise themselves in what the organisation is trying to do, energy no longer has to be pushed from the top. It is also pulled from within. Initiatives reinforce one another. People speak about their work with pride. That dynamic is not a soft extra; over time it shows in results.
An organisation can keep running long after it has stopped connecting.
Start with The Leadership Question →Resonance is built, not declared
It would be easy to make this sound mystical. It is not. Resonance tends to appear when the story holds together: when the reason the organisation exists, the way it is run and the choices its leaders make point in the same direction. It disappears when they diverge, however well the purpose statement is written.
Nor is there one recipe. A regulated operator, a scale-up and a business restructuring a declining product line each face a different version of the same task. What they share is the need for leaders who understand both the operating model and the people expected to believe in it.
When the person evolves faster than the system
A recurring pattern in senior careers is not failure but outgrowth. A leader begins to think at a different horizon: further ahead, more systemically, with a wider sense of responsibility. The organisation around them, however, remains organised around what it already knows — control, predictability, the next twelve months.
The result is friction. It is often misread as a motivation problem or a performance issue. More often, it is a mismatch between an evolving identity and a system designed for stability in a world that offers little of it.
Treated as a malfunction, that friction is neutralised — and the organisation often loses the very people who could help it adapt. Treated as information, it can point to what the organisation might need to become.
Friction is information before it becomes a problem.
See this from the other side of the table →Identity, ethics and relevance
There is a limit to what structure alone can hold. When leadership is reduced to compliance with a plan nobody believes creates long-term value, people disengage. What remains is a collection of individuals rather than a living whole.
The antidote is not perfection but credibility: leaders who can reflect on their own certainties, say what they stand for when it is uncomfortable, and admit when they do not know. Organisations stay relevant when they are treated as living systems that must keep learning, rather than as machines to be optimised.
“When a leader outgrows the system, someone has to ask which of the two needs to change.
Bring the question to Stefan →The leadership question
For boards, owners and executives, the practical question is this: when friction appears, what is it telling us? Sometimes a leader needs to evolve. Sometimes the system does. Sometimes both have simply stopped sharing the same direction, and the honest response is to recognise that without assigning blame.
The mistake is to ignore the signal until it has become a departure, a disengaged team or a strategy that no longer convinces anyone. Naming the tension early keeps more options open — for the organisation and for the people in it.
