“We can do this.”
No data behind those three words. Just enough conviction in the room to end the debate before it started.
I watched that happen inside a large investment management firm that decided to bring core operations back in-house, work it had quietly paid someone else to do for years. The functions are strategic, the leadership team told itself. We should own them. At our scale, the economics clearly favour it.
I’m not going to walk you through what broke first, or which system failed to reconcile, or which quarter forced the reckoning. That isn’t the story worth telling. Real work was involved — the unglamorous machinery that keeps a wealth manager solvent and compliant — and it strained the way real work strains under a plan built faster than their capability to carry it. But that’s a sliver of the story, not its centre.
The centre is this: what leadership believes about its own capacity can drift a long way from what the organization can actually carry. And almost nobody in that room stopped to ask which one they were acting on.
Mindset is not a personality trait. In the corporate world, mindsets form perceptions. A belief doesn’t stay a belief for long — repeated often enough, defended often enough, it hardens into a stance the leadership team carries into every decision that follows. That stance is the mindset, and its real work isn’t holding an opinion. It’s filtering what gets perceived. Once the stance is we can do this, every signal that follows gets read through it. A setback becomes a teething problem. A gap becomes something the hiring plan will close. None of that is dishonesty. It’s the mindset doing exactly what a mindset does: deciding, in advance, what counts as evidence and what counts as noise. By the time a belief has become a mindset, it no longer announces itself as a belief. It presents as a fact, and facts don’t get cross-examined in the room where the decision gets made.
For the leadership team, insourcing was a strategic decision, weighed against a business case and a competitive position. For the people asked to carry it out, it was something else entirely. It was their work — the thing many had spent years building meaning around — suddenly treated as incidental to something more important: the transformation. Few leaders arrive at a decision like that having asked what the work already meant to the people doing it. Not out of cruelty. It simply doesn’t occur to most of them that the question needs to be asked.
I put real meaning into my work. I assume you do too, in yours. So does almost everyone I’ve ever sat across from, in a boardroom or on the floor doing the job itself. That meaning rarely shows up on an org chart, and it never appears in a business case. But when a change treats it as irrelevant — when the transformation itself becomes the priority and the purpose someone built into their work over years is simply set aside — the result isn’t only fatigue. It’s something closer to demoralization: the quiet conclusion that the work, and by extension the person doing it, matters less than they’d believed.
Nobody has to say any of this out loud for it to be true. It shows up in smaller ways. A person who used to be consulted for their judgment starts being asked for their hours instead. A role that used to require thinking gets reduced to keeping up. Almost nobody affected by this calls it demoralization, even to themselves. They just start describing their own work in fewer words than before.
That is where a leadership mindset meets the lived experience of the people carrying the work—and where the real damage gets done. Leadership’s stance filters what it perceives about the organization’s capacity. That belief is often asserted with more confidence than evidence, because the capacity that matters is rarely measured in a form leaders can see. But the people carrying out the work have a stance of their own, built over years on the belief that their work matters, and that mindset filters how they perceive the change happening around them. At first, many perceive trust — we’ve been given something real to own. As the gap between the promise and the daily reality widens, that perception shifts, and what they understand their purpose to be shifts with it: from something they were trusted to do well, to something they are simply required to do to survive. Two mindsets, two perceptions, and only one of them ever shows up on a dashboard.
None of this means the change is wrong to make. Firms sometimes have to insource, restructure and develop new capabilities. More broadly, organizations that cannot evolve will eventually fall behind. What it means is that a leadership team’s confidence in its own capacity is a belief before it is anything else, and beliefs deserve the same scrutiny you would give any other assumption a business case rests on. Ask what you actually know about what your organization can carry, separate from what you have simply decided to believe. Ask, before the plan is final, what the work already means to the people who will be asked to carry more of it. Neither question is difficult. What’s difficult is remembering to ask them before the certainty sets in, not after the people who could have told you have already stopped believing you’d want to know.
Two questions, then, worth sitting with honestly, not answering quickly.
Before you decided your organization could carry this change, did you measure that capacity — or did you simply decide to believe it?
And for the people who will carry it out, whose sense of purpose is built into the very work you’re about to redesign — did you ever ask what that work means to them, before deciding the change mattered more?
