Picture this. Quarterly planning. On the screen, the status of the platform migration you announced in March: green, green, yellow, green. Everybody in the room knows it won’t deliver what was promised. Your senior engineers knew it in May. Your product manager knew it in June. And you? You knew it too. But you were the one who stood in front of the whole department and defended that decision.
So the slide stays green. And the team quietly pays the price.
I see this scene in tech organizations over and over again. And the best antidote I’ve heard in a long time came from the guest of the 200th episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast.
The Superpower Nobody Puts in a Job Description
Freddie Szydłowski, Co-Founder of Embargo (a platform supporting almost 4,000 cafés, restaurants and bakeries), played in Poland’s top basketball league at 19. Then he quit, bought a ticket to London (a city he had never visited) and started from scratch. When COVID hit, his funding round collapsed, revenue dropped to zero, and he still said no to an acquisition offer to keep building.
When I asked him about his founder superpowers, he named resilience, long-term thinking and one more: “a completely shameless ability to change and fail.”
Long-term vision AND changing things almost every week? Sounds like a contradiction. It’s not. The north star stays fixed. The route to get there should be ready to change. Freddie compared it to Formula 1: if you take the curves faster than everybody else, you’ll crash once in a while. Just don’t crash so hard that you can’t race again.
Why We Defend the Route (Hint: It’s Not Logic)
In 1976, Barry Staw published a study with a title I love: “Knee-deep in the big muddy”. People committed the most resources to a failing course of action when they were personally responsible for the original decision. Not when the data supported it. When their name was on it.
That’s the trap. It’s not stupidity, it’s identity (and ego, let’s be honest here).
From the CQ perspective, two bases fall into it most often, and guess what, they are the ones I meet most in tech teams. A Thinker wants 100% of the data before deciding, puts a lot of effort into the analysis, and then finds it painful to let that decision go. A Persister turns commitment into a superpower… until it becomes “this is what I said, so this is what we do”.
Jeff Bezos put a number on the alternative in his 2016 letter to shareholders: most decisions should be made with around 70% of the information you wish you had, because “if you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think.” Most decisions are two-way doors. Treat them that way.
Don’t Rely on Courage. Build Change Into the System.
If changing course depends on your courage on a random Tuesday, it won’t happen. Make it part of how your team works:
- Write kill criteria before you start. Annie Duke shows in Quit that we almost always quit too late. Decide upfront: “If by the end of Q1 we don’t see X, we stop or rethink.” When that moment comes, you’re not admitting failure. You’re keeping your word.
- Run a premortem. Gary Klein’s premortem is simple: imagine the project has already failed, and everyone writes down why. People who would never question your plan in a regular meeting suddenly have permission to.
- Give decisions an expiry date. Your engineers already know Architecture Decision Records, where a decision can officially be marked “superseded”. Add a review date to your big process and people decisions too, not only the architecture ones.
- Make “stop” the default, not “extend”. In Shape Up, Basecamp’s circuit breaker means a project that doesn’t ship in its cycle doesn’t get an extension by default. Flip the burden of proof: continuing needs a reason, stopping doesn’t.
Then Say It Out Loud (And Tailor It)
The system helps you decide. But trust is built in the moment you tell your team: “I made this call in March. Here’s what we learned. Here’s what we’re changing.”
And this is where Communication Intelligence matters, because the same message lands differently with different people (more on that in One Leadership Style Won’t Cut It):
- Thinkers need the data: what we measured, what we learned, what the new plan is based on.
- Persisters need the why: how this change serves the north star that hasn’t moved.
- Harmonizers need to hear that you see their effort and what the change means for the people involved.
- Promoters need it short and decisive: what we do next, starting today.
- Rebels need energy: frame it as a new experiment, not a funeral.
- Imaginers need clarity and space: one clear next step and time to process it.
You know what happens next? Trust goes up, not down. Amy Edmondson’s research on psychological safety shows that teams learn when they believe it’s safe to take interpersonal risks. Nothing makes it safer than a leader who says “I got this wrong” without drama. Your people get permission to stop hiding problems in the status report.
There’s a bonus, too. Every project you kill frees capacity. One lesson Freddie took from Dan Martell’s Buy Back Your Time: every yes is a no to something else. If saying no is hard for you, this article will help.
The Bottom Line
I played the violin for 14 years. Then management engineering, then psychology, then building my own business. From the outside, it looked inconsistent. Do I regret any of it? Not one thing. The direction was always there. Only the route changed.
Shameless doesn’t mean careless. It means your ego is not the one making decisions.
So, here’s my question for you: which decision are you still defending only because your name is on it?
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