YOUR WEAKNESS CAN'T WAIT

Fun fact: I live in an old oak forest with a tall canopy, where trees grow quickly and bend toward any patch of sunlight. This can severely distort trunks and limbs, making the trees unstable over time.

The strange thing is that their problem is partly caused by their success. They’re exceptionally good at finding light. They grow fast enough and bend far enough to reach it, sometimes creating structures that can’t ultimately support what they’ve become.

We keep an eye out for problems, especially trees around the house, outbuildings, and property lines. Over the last 10 years, we have probably had to remove about two dozen trees and major limbs that were literally hanging over our heads.

As we ate dinner last Friday, I heard a loud double thump from outside. It sounded big. "What was that?" I asked Kate. "A truck or...something else?"

She could see the road over my shoulder, where large trucks sometimes cut through to beat evening traffic. She shook her head and said she hadn't seen a big rig pass by. 

All was quiet as I went outside, but I was looking for the telltale signs that a tree had gone down. Sure enough, I saw a new patch of daylight between us and the neighbors, and the clue of leaves still drifting down from the crash.

The cracked-off stump in the picture above is all that remained standing from a 50-ft tree that had arced over the neighbor's driveway. The top of the tree was probably 20 feet off-center from the bottom, creating a ticking time bomb for anything underneath it.

We had seen the tree's shape and knew it needed to come down at some point. But from all outward appearances, the tree was alive and healthy, and no wind or rain suggested it was a problem today. Yet there it was, snapped off and perfectly dropped between the neighbor's well pump shed and car (!!).

The first thing I did was invte Kate and the kids out, while I called the neighbor to tell them what happened. A few hours and two chainsaw chains later, we all had something to laugh about. This is, without a doubt, the best possible outcome to what could have been a tragedy.

THE WARNING SIGNS ARE USUALLY THERE

Let’s face it: we knew this tree was a problem. We even talked to the neighbors about it when they moved in a few months ago. The next time we had our “tree guy” out to take down dead trees and scary branches, this one was on the list.

But that was a problem for another day, until that became TODAY. This is also how many organizational crises develop.

In any business or nonprofit, there are already too many things to worry about. The urgent competes with the important every day. So if a simmering problem isn’t boiling, it gets left on the back burner.

That doesn’t necessarily mean nobody sees it. Sometimes everyone sees it, but they don’t understand what it means yet. Or they understand it, but nothing has happened that makes addressing it more important than the dozen other problems demanding attention right now.

That distinction matters because crises are a surprisingly normal part of business operations.

PwC’s 2023 Global Crisis and Resilience Survey covered 1,812 senior executives worldwide. It found that 91% had experienced at least one disruption (other than COVID) in the prior two years, averaging 3.5 disruptions over that timespan. And 76% said their most serious disruption had a susbtantial operational impact.

Then consider a 2026 Harris Poll for Crisis24 of 303 senior U.S. business leaders:

• 100% described their organization’s approach to crisis planning as proactive.

• 93% said their organizations had missed warning signs of crises or disruptions.

• 25% said that happened frequently or all the time.

That’s quite a contradiction: if everyone thinks they’re proactive, how does almost everyone miss warning signs? Part of the answer is culture.

Research on organizational silence by Elizabeth Morrison, Frances Milliken and Patricia Hewlin found that most employees they interviewed could remember situations where they had concerns about an organizational problem but chose not to raise them.

Fear of being negatively labeled or damaging relationships were among the most common explanations. We tend to discount information based on the person delivering it, and if someone complains enough, eventually their complaints become part of how we see them.

Nobody wants to be “that guy," even if that guy is right. Those employees can be some of the people most invested in an organization’s success. Their frustration isn’t necessarily evidence that they’ve checked out, but rather that they’re frustrated precisely because they haven’t.

When those warnings are ignored, misunderstood or perpetually deferred, organizations get what's called the “predictable surprise." This is where leaders experience a major problem as a surprise even though enough information existed to anticipate it.

The problem wasn’t invisible, but it wasn’t understood as a crisis until it became one.

LISTEN. INTERPRET. ACT.

Back in 2023, I had the opportunity to work with a large organization that simply could not hire the talent it needed. Their headcount was down more than 20%, and the staffing shortage was creating very real operational problems.

Just below the surface, leadership knew that morale was also plummeting. They thought they had a recruiting problem and needed marketing help, but the roots went much deeper.

Listen

There were plenty of warning signs inside the organization, but the culture made some of them difficult to hear.

Leadership was tired of hearing from frustrated employees who had plenty to say about why morale was bad. Some of those people had developed reputations as malcontents, which made it easy to dismiss their complaints.

To establish a baseline, we created a different feedback loop. This started with stratified, confidential interviews, asking to speak with someone in every function of the organization, on every team within those functions, and at every level of leadership.

We also conducted a confidential survey to understand the true internal temperature across a wide range of topics.

The results showed stark problems with trust in leadership, job satisfaction and employees’ overall sense of belonging.

But they also showed something else: many of the “malcontents” cared deeply about the organization. They were frustrated because they saw problems, had ideas for fixing them, and didn’t believe the existing system was hearing them.

Interpret

The organization didn’t have separate “morale” and “recruiting” problems. They had a vicious cycle where understaffing put more pressure on the employees who remained, which was causing morale to spiral.

Organizational leadership already suspected that morale was bad, but thought it could be solved by replenishing the staff. What they didn’t account for was how low morale was impacting the hiring process.

Current employees are one of the most important parts of any talent attraction strategy. They are the people prospective employees know. They are the people candidates quietly call before applying. They are the people who answer the question: What’s it actually like to work there?

If the answers to that question were as negative as the survey and interviews showed, then nobody was telling friends and family to come work there. Even if they did, they were being recruited into an organizational culture that was turning toxic for retention.

What looked like two separate problems was actually one closely intertwined cycle.

Act

Knowledge is power, but then you have to take action. If leadership measures the problem, collects feedback for improvement, then inaction sends a signal that the status quo is fine.

To their credit, leadership acted on as much of the feedback as policy and budget would permit. Some of the solutions that ultimately got implemented came from the same frustrated employees whose complaints had previously been discounted.

And as the organization rebuilt internal communication and trust, it began re-engaging the most important people in its recruiting strategy: current employees. This had a gradual positive impact on both recruiting and retention, which should compound over time.

What we discovered through this process was not a scandal. From the outside, it looked like an organization struggling to fill jobs in a difficult labor market.

Most of your crises will feel the same, where there isn't a lawsuit, viral video or executive perp walk to point back to. It could be a nonprofit quietly losing donors, a business with high customer churn, or any number of human connection problems. 

That’s what makes this kind of crisis feel operational. Sometimes a crisis is just a problem you’ve tolerated long enough that it starts creating other problems.

THE TREE WASN'T DEAD

Which brings me back to that curved oak, and how nothing particularly unusual happened last Friday: no major storm or wind, and nobody touched the tree. It just fell.

But that’s not really true, either.

That tree had spent decades competing for sunlight. It did what successful trees in a dense forest do: it found an opening and grew toward it.

Over time, the top moved farther from the base. More weight accumulated where the structure was least capable of supporting it. The tree was alive and growing (successful), but it was becoming more vulnerable at the same time.

Organizations do this, too.

A great employee becomes indispensable until she’s a single point of failure. A huge client fuels growth until losing them would threaten the company. A founder solves every problem until nobody else knows how. A nonprofit adds successful programs faster than it builds the administrative capacity to support them.

Success creates its own weaknesses, and we usually know what they are. The mistake is believing that because something isn’t failing TODAY, we have time to deal with it tomorrow.

We knew that tree was leaning, and we knew it couldn’t keep growing that way forever. Then one perfectly ordinary Friday, tomorrow became today. The thump wasn’t the beginning of the crisis, but it was the end of the warning.

What is already leaning in your organization?