The Courage Lie
What it sounds like
“We need to have more difficult conversations.”
“We need to build a culture of candour.”
“People need to speak up more.”
“We need to tackle the things we’ve been avoiding.”
“The problem is that nobody’s willing to say the hard thing.”
There may be things people aren’t saying. That doesn’t necessarily mean the organisation is short of courage.
Why it makes sense
Most leaders can point to conversations that should have happened earlier.
A performance problem was allowed to continue. A risk wasn’t escalated clearly enough. Somebody knew a programme was in trouble but didn’t say so. A leadership team politely worked around a disagreement everybody could see.
So the diagnosis feels reasonable: we need more candour.
Create psychological safety. Encourage challenge. Train managers to have difficult conversations. Ask people to speak up. Make accountability clearer.
None of those things is inherently wrong but look more closely at an organisation under sustained pressure and you may find something surprising.
People are already having difficult conversations constantly.
They’re challenging performance, managing escalations, negotiating priorities, explaining missed deadlines, dealing with unhappy stakeholders, holding exhausted teams together and trying to deliver against commitments that don’t comfortably coexist.
These aren’t people avoiding difficulty. Often, they’re surrounded by it.
What it hides
The problem may not be the number of difficult conversations.
It may be where they’re happening and what they’re about.
A delivery leader challenges their team to move faster.
A manager tells somebody they need to take greater accountability.
A programme director escalates another dependency.
A leadership team discusses why a transformation is behind plan.
Every conversation addresses something real. Every one may be entirely justified.
And yet none of them changes the conditions producing the problem.
The conflicting priorities remain. The organisation is still carrying more work than it can finish. The unresolved decision is still unresolved. The expectations remain greater than the capacity available to meet them.
So another round of difficult conversations begins.
The organisation can become extremely good at confronting the consequences while never confronting the conditions creating them.
This is where the Courage Lie becomes expensive.
If the diagnosis is people need to be braver, responsibility naturally moves towards the people being asked to speak, challenge, escalate or perform differently.
The people absorbing the consequences of the system are asked to become better at coping with them.
Meanwhile, the conversation capable of changing those conditions may still not be happening.
The uncomfortable possibility
What if courage isn’t absent?
What if it’s pointed at the wrong target?
The conversation that matters may be much further upstream.
Can the organisation genuinely carry everything it has committed to?
Which priorities win when they conflict?
What expectations have been created that cannot simultaneously be met?
What pressure is the board placing on the CEO?
What is the CEO promising the board?
What assumptions are investors making about what the organisation can produce?
What has everybody quietly agreed not to question because questioning it would force a much more difficult choice?
Those conversations are harder because they don’t simply require somebody to speak up.
They may require the people with the greatest authority to examine the conditions they themselves are helping to create.
And that changes the question completely.
Instead of:
Why aren’t people saying what needs to be said?
Ask:
Are the people who can actually change this having the conversation that needs to be had?
One right conversation beats a hundred misplaced ones.
This isn’t an argument against candour.
It’s an argument for putting candour where it can change something.
TEST IT
Think about the difficult conversations happening repeatedly in your organisation.
Performance conversations. Escalations. Accountability discussions. Delivery reviews. Conversations about pace, capability or missed commitments.
Then ask:
If all of these conversations went brilliantly, would the conditions creating the problem actually change?
If the answer is no, follow the problem upstream.
Who can change those conditions?
What conversation would they need to have?
And why hasn’t that conversation happened?
You may still discover that somebody needs to be braver.
But make sure you’re asking for courage from the people who can change the conditions, not simply more courage from the people living with them.
The organisation may not need more difficult conversations. It may need the right difficult conversation in the right room.
Last updated October 2026
