Urgency without direction doesn’t create momentum. It creates motion. And motion is not the same as progress.
In a 2023 Harvard Business Review article, executive coach Dina Denham Smith described the corrosive effect of “false urgency” — cultures where everything is treated as critical, where reactivity crowds out the creative and deep work that only happens when people have time and space to think. Her focus was the day-to-day: the inflated deadlines, the performative busyness, the leaders who mistake speed for value.
But after two decades advising CEOs and leadership teams on innovation strategy, leadership and culture, I’d argue the most expensive version of false urgency doesn’t show up in the daily workload at all.
It shows up in the boardroom, at the precise moment the numbers turn.
Market share slips. Growth targets get missed two quarters running. A competitor does something uncomfortable. And suddenly the organisation is gripped by an urgent, collective conviction that we must do something different — now.
That conviction feels like leadership. It looks decisive. It’s usually the first mistake.
Reacting Is Not Responding
Special forces operators make a distinction that every executive team should have etched into the wall of the boardroom: the difference between reacting and responding.
A reaction is instinctive, immediate and driven by the threat. The threat sets the agenda; you’re simply moving to its rhythm. A response is different. It’s still fast — often faster than outsiders expect — but it’s deliberate. It draws on training, on preparation, on a clear understanding of the desired outcome. The situation informs the response; it doesn’t dictate it.
Elite units can respond under extreme pressure precisely because of what they built before the pressure arrived: capability, rehearsed decision-making, clarity about intent. Under stress, they don’t rise to the occasion. They fall back on their preparation.
Most organisations facing strategic difficulty do the opposite. They have no prepared capability to fall back on, so the threat dictates everything. The declining numbers set the tempo, the mood and, most dangerously, the solution. Someone proposes a transformation programme, a restructure, a new operating model, an AI initiative, and the sheer relief of doing something is mistaken for strategic clarity.
This is ‘reaction’ dressed up as decisiveness. And it produces a very predictable pattern.
The Reaction Spiral
I’ve watched this cycle play out inside organisations of every size, in almost every sector, and it runs with depressing reliability.
First comes the trigger: the current strategy visibly stops working. Then comes the reaction: an urgent initiative launched at pace, chosen more for its visibility and speed than its fit. And, because the initiative was never anchored to a clearly defined outcome, only to the anxiety of the moment, it inevitably drifts. Eighteen months later the results haven’t materialised, so the organisation reacts again: a new programme, a new structure, new language, sometimes new leadership.
Each cycle burns three things that are extremely hard to recover.
It burns focus, because every urgent pivot fragments the organisation’s attention and stalls the work that was quietly compounding value. It burns trust, because employees have seen this film before — I’ve written previously about the “organisational cry wolf” effect, where every failed transformation announcement makes the workforce a little more cynical about the next one, and leadership credibility accrues debt it can rarely repay. And it burns capacity, because people can’t do the deep, creative, exploratory work that genuine renewal requires while they’re bracing for the next reorganisation.
Here’s the uncomfortable irony: the reactive change designed to fix underperformance becomes a cause of underperformance. The organisation ends up with more change and less progress — motion without movement.
Denham Smith’s point about false urgency at the task level applies perfectly at the strategic level: when everything is urgent, nothing gets the thinking it deserves. Least of all the questions that matter most.
The Question That Never Gets Asked
In the reaction spiral, one question consistently goes missing: What is the outcome we actually want?
Not “what should we do about the numbers?” — that question invites activity. The outcome question invites clarity, and clarity is precisely what pressure destroys if you let it.
When I sit with executive teams in this situation, the conversation almost always starts with solutions. We need a transformation. We need to restructure. We need AI. My job, in that first conversation, is usually to slow the room down long enough to ask what problem those solutions are meant to solve, and what the organisation should look like on the other side of solving it.
It’s remarkable how often there’s no shared answer. Ten executives, ten subtly different destinations, one urgent programme already in flight.
“Ten executives, ten subtly different destinations, one urgent programme already in flight. That’s not a strategy. That’s a reaction with a budget.”
Reacting starts with the threat and works forwards, which is why it so often produces the wrong approach because the approach is anchored to the anxiety, not the destination. Responding starts with the desired outcome and works backwards. It asks what’s genuinely broken, what’s merely cyclical, what the signal actually is beneath the noise, and only then what the proportionate, sequenced answer looks like.
That discipline feels slower. In my experience it’s dramatically faster, because it’s the difference between one considered response and three consecutive reactions.
Why “Leading for Innovation” Is the Answer to a Question Most Leaders Haven’t Asked
Here’s where this connects to the work I’ve spent the last two decades doing — and why I’ve become ever more convinced that building the capability to innovate is not a growth initiative but a survival discipline.
The reason organisations react rather than respond isn’t a character flaw in their executives. It’s an absence of capability. Responding under pressure requires things that have to exist before the pressure arrives: a leadership team practised at navigating ambiguity, a culture where people close to the problem can surface truth without fear, mechanisms for sensing change early, and the organisational muscle to experiment, learn and scale at pace.
Those are not crisis-management capabilities. They are innovation capabilities.
This is what I mean by leading for innovation — as distinct from leading innovation projects. Leaders who lead for innovation aren’t primarily running ideation programmes or opening labs. They’re deliberately building ‘conditions’ i.e. the strategic, cultural and behavioural conditions that let an organisation continuously sense, interpret and ‘respond’ to shifting dynamics. The innovation is an effect; the capability is the cause.
And that capability changes everything about how difficulty is experienced. An organisation with genuine innovation capability rarely faces the “our strategy has suddenly stopped working” cliff at all, because it has been sensing, experimenting and adjusting continuously. Strategic renewal happens in increments, at the edges, before it’s forced to happen in one convulsive, expensive lurch at the centre.
The organisations that end up in the reaction spiral are almost always the ones that treated innovation as discretionary — a programme, a team, a line item to cut when the numbers tightened. They optimised for efficiency and predictability in the good years, and in doing so quietly dismantled the very capabilities they’d desperately need in the hard ones. I’ve described this before as a brittleness problem: organisations demanding adaptability while systematically eliminating the conditions that make it possible. Brittle systems don’t bend under pressure. They snap — and reactive transformation is what snapping looks like.
The evidence of the gap is stark. In our research for the book ‘Building a Culture of Innovation’, and consistently in the years since, the pattern holds: the overwhelming majority of executives say innovation is critical to their future, while only a small fraction are satisfied with their organisation’s ability to deliver it. Typically the numbers say 84% vs 6%. That gap between conviction and capability is exactly the space in which reaction lives.
What Responding Actually Requires of Leaders
So what does it look like to respond rather than react when the numbers turn, the board is anxious and the pressure is real? From the work I’ve done with leadership teams navigating exactly this moment, five disciplines separate the responders from the reactors.
Regulate the urgency before you transmit it. Pressure flows downhill and amplifies as it goes. A CEO’s private anxiety becomes a leadership team’s urgency becomes an organisation’s panic. Leaders who respond absorb pressure and transmit clarity. Leaders who react transmit the pressure itself — and then wonder why the organisation is frozen or frantic. The special forces insight applies directly: composure isn’t the absence of urgency; it’s urgency under command.
Define the outcome before you select the approach. No initiative, restructure or technology investment should be approved until the leadership team can articulate — specifically and collectively — the outcome it exists to produce, and how they’ll know it’s working. If the team can’t agree on the destination, the vehicle is irrelevant. This sounds obvious. In my experience it is honoured almost entirely in the breach, because defining outcomes is intellectually and politically harder than launching programmes.
Diagnose before you prescribe. Falling performance is a symptom with many possible diseases: market shift, value proposition decay, capability erosion, cultural drag, or simple cyclicality. Reactive organisations skip the diagnosis because the act of diagnosis feels like delay. But a fast wrong answer is slower than a slightly-less-fast right one. The teams I work with learn to ask what has actually changed — in the market, in the customer, in themselves — before deciding what must change in response.
Protect the thinking space when it’s least affordable. This is Denham Smith’s insight applied at altitude: deep work needs time and space, and that’s as true of strategic thinking as of any other kind. The moment of maximum pressure is precisely the moment leadership teams most need protected time to think — and precisely the moment they feel least entitled to take it. The best leaders I’ve worked with treat that thinking time as non-negotiable, because they understand that the alternative isn’t speed. It’s rework.
Build response capability before you need it. This is the discipline that makes the other four possible, and it’s the one that can’t be improvised in the moment. Leadership behaviours that create psychological safety, decision authority pushed towards the people closest to the problem, middle managers equipped to drive change rather than merely absorb it, a culture where experimentation and learning are systemic rather than performative — these take years to build and they pay out precisely when everything else is failing. You cannot install them mid-crisis, any more than a special forces unit can start training after the operation has begun.
The Real Choice
When difficulty arrives — and in a world this volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous, it will keep arriving — every leadership team makes a choice, whether it realises it or not.
React: let the threat set the agenda, launch the urgent initiative, mistake motion for progress, and pay for it in focus, trust and capacity. Or respond: hold the pressure, define the outcome, diagnose honestly, and draw on capability built long before it was needed.
The first option is always available and always feels justified in the moment. The second is only available to organisations whose leaders decided, well in advance, to build for it.
That, ultimately, is what leading for innovation means. Not chasing the next big idea — but building an organisation that never has to panic about the next big threat.
The strategy will stop working eventually. Every strategy does. The only question that matters is what you’ll have built by then.