I keep coming back to fugu.
Not because I’ve eaten it (I haven’t, and I’m not sure I’d volunteer), but because of what it represents. A dish of pufferfish that carries enough toxin in the wrong tissue to stop a heart within hours, and there is no antidote. Basically, it can kill you if the person preparing it relies on instinct instead of process. And yet, prepared correctly, it’s considered one of the finest things you can eat.
I think about that distinction constantly in my work with leaders, not that any are licensed to prepare fugu.
I’ve sat across from leaders with exceptionally good instincts, people who care about their culture, who write thoughtful strategy, who believe in their teams. And I’ve watched those same good intentions produce inconsistent results, quarter after quarter, because nobody built the system underneath them.
The leader who’s fair in every conversation they remember to have, but inconsistent across the ones they don’t. The culture that’s real in the founder’s head but never gets translated into a scorecard, a cadence, a repeatable practice the whole team can see and hold each other to. The strategy that was right, and still died, because it lived in a deck instead of a rhythm.
None of that is a character problem. It’s a systems problem wearing a character costume.
What the fugu chef has that most organizations don’t is repetition under supervision. The same protocol, checked, practiced, boring by design, until it’s second nature.
Most leaders don’t need better intentions. They need fewer moments when good intentions quietly do a system’s job.
So here’s what I’d ask: where in your organization are you trusting judgment to do what only a system can do reliably, and would you know before it cost you something?
