The Ostrich in the Boardroom: When Management Chooses Not to Look

In my last piece I called procrastination a management disease, and ended on a second animal. Here it is — the ostrich. 🙈

Procrastination at least admits the problem is real: “I’ll do it tomorrow.” The ostrich goes one worse: “I don’t see it.” Head in the sand. And you cannot act on what you refuse to look at.

Denial is quieter than delay

Procrastination is noisy — it leaves a to-do that nags. Denial leaves nothing: no task, no reminder, no trace. The problem simply isn’t on anyone’s list, because putting it on the list would mean owning it. That is what makes the ostrich more expensive than the procrastinator. The procrastinator loses time. The ostrich loses the problem itself — until it comes back, grown, as a crisis “nobody saw coming,” because nobody was looking.

How organisations put their head in the sand

It rarely looks like cowardice. It looks like process: the dashboard nobody opens; the metric we quietly stopped tracking because the trend was uncomfortable; the bad news that softens at every layer on its way up, until the board hears “minor headwind”; the question we don’t ask the customer because we are afraid of the answer. Each is a small act of not-looking — and together they build a culture where the sand is always within reach.

Back to the space station

On the ISS, not-looking is not an option. Every system is instrumented, every anomaly surfaces, because a missed signal is measured in lives, not quarters. The discipline is not courage — it is visibility by design. The problem cannot hide, so it cannot grow in the dark. That is the real antidote to the ostrich: not bravery, but instrumentation. Make the uncomfortable thing impossible not to see.

So the follow-up to last week’s question: what in your organisation is everyone quietly not looking at — and what would it take to put it on the screen?

Procrastination and denial: two excuses, one result — the options are gone before anyone acts. The first wastes your time. The second wastes your sight.