Imagine a leadership team where every important decision somehow ends up with one veteran VP we’ll call Dana.
Dana fancies herself a “consummate leader” and is known as the person who speaks up first at meetings. People look to her before committing and feel safe doing so.
Managers who are new to the organization, however, complain that she “takes over.” The CEO wants the team to lead more independently, yet Dana, they insist, keeps showing up in the middle of their decision-making process.
It is easy to tell a convincing story to the coach or consultant who comes in to help address a problem that is now affecting the bottom line…
- Dana is controlling.
- The team is dependent.
- The hierarchy is confused.
- Maybe Dana is filling an authority vacuum the CEO has failed to occupy.
That last explanation can feel especially satisfying as it has a hint of Systemic Intelligence.
But what do we actually know?
A Good Story Is Still a Story
What have we actually observed?
- Important decisions repeatedly come back to Dana. Check.
- People defer to her. Check.
- She gets involved in matters that, according to the organization chart, belong to other leaders. Check.
So what are we inferring? Answer: that Dana wants control; that the team needs her; that the CEO is weak; and that an informal hierarchy has formed.
Those are all possible explanations, but they are not observations.
Now, you investigate and learn that the CEO privately asked Dana to vet high-risk decisions during a leadership transition the organization was undergoing.
Two of the newer VPs were still learning the business, and the CEO has been using Dana as an unofficial backstop. Nobody else knows that arrangement exists.
To a Culture Strategist, the pattern still matters, but the story has changed.
Dana may be overstepping, but she may also be doing exactly what the CEO asked her to do.
The team’s deference to her may be less about dependency and more about responding to an authority vibe everyone can feel, but no one has named.
If a consultant walked into the room and announced, “Dana is the real leader here,” they would have named something visible while missing the source of it. Nothing would move. At least not in a way that would strengthen the workplace culture.
The executives didn’t need a final answer then; they needed more information.
A systemic lens widens the field and multiplies the number of plausible explanations. Systemic Intelligence has a discipline: observe what is happening, get curious, form a hypothesis, investigate it, and then decide whether and where to intervene.
That sequence sounds obvious, but a compelling story can make us surprisingly eager to skip the middle part.
Intuition Is Useful. It Just Doesn’t Get the Last Word
Experienced coaches and consultants often sense something before they can explain it.
They can feel a room shift when one person’s name comes up, or sense a meeting go strangely flat when so-and-so is there.
They are sensitive to qualities such as one person carrying far more emotional weight than their role would suggest, or noticing, for example, that a leader says all the right things, yet nobody moves until someone else speaks.
You probably are at a point in your work where you trust those moments enough to get curious about them.
I do too, but I do not trust them enough to call them facts.
Intuition is information, not evidence.
The rise of Emotional Intelligence over the last thirty years has helped many of us become better readers of behavior, emotion, and relationships.
Systemic Intelligence adds another layer by asking us to notice role, authority, history, loyalty, structure, exchange, and the field conditions that shape people’s actions.
What appears to be control may be anxiety, unclear authority, a role requirement, a learned adaptation, political caution, or simply a preference for control.
I am always aware that the same behavior can arise from very different conditions.
So one of the most useful questions I know is:
What evidence would make me change my mind?
Naming Changes the Room
There is another reason to be careful with our interpretations.
Once an experienced coach or consultant says, “This team is organized around Dana’s authority,” the statement enters the system.
- Dana may defend herself.
- The CEO may retreat.
- Other leaders may seize on the explanation because it conveniently removes attention from their own choices.
A sentence that began as an interpretation can quickly become the new official story.
Naming is an intervention.
That does not mean we keep our mouths shut or dilute every observation with a nervous “maybe.” It means a hypothesis can guide our inquiry before it becomes public truth.
We might ask:
- What decisions require Dana’s involvement?
- What happens when another VP decides without her?
- How did this arrangement begin?
- Who asked Dana to carry this role?
- What evidence contradicts the idea that she is controlling the system?
Sometimes restraint protects a system from a certainty we have not yet earned.
Check This Out Before You Trust Your Read
Choose one live situation where you already have a strong interpretation of what is happening.
Write that interpretation in one sentence.
Then ask:
- What did I actually observe?
- What am I inferring from those observations?
- What evidence would make me revise or abandon my interpretation?
The goal is not to stop listening to your intuition or tone down your pattern recognition.
It’s to prevent the first elegant story we tell ourselves from becoming the system’s next problem.
The skill is in holding what you see lightly enough to test it.