Pinning Your Hopes On A Mural

There's a mural hanging in an organisation's boardroom right now. It's beautiful. I mean it - genuinely impressive artwork. Pastel colours. Evocative imagery. Words like "brave," "enabler," "magic maker," and "empowered at all levels" rendered in careful, considered brushstrokes by a talented live scribe artist who spent five hours at the back of a leadership forum capturing the vibe, the energy, the commitments of the room.

It cost a good chunk of money.

It also captured, in extraordinary detail, the gap between where this organisation thought it was and where it actually was.

The Head of HR had reached out for a chat. His organisation had just completed a 12-month leadership development program and something wasn't adding up. As we walked to our reserved meeting room, one of the first things he wanted to show me was the mural. It hung on the wall of the executive meeting room. He was proud of it. We stood in silence. He smiled as he recalled the day it was created.

I broke the silence with a question.

"So, how do you make this happen?"

He looked confused. "What do you mean?"

I repeated myself. "How do you make all of this happen?"  My hands gesturing toward the wall.

Silence.

"What does 'empowered at all levels' actually mean here?" I asked.

He told me his organisation empowers all its leaders, current and emerging.

"How?" I asked. "Can you give me an example?"

Nothing came to mind.

I pushed further. "As a leader in this organisation, what authority do I have? If I wanted to enhance customer service excellence - could I implement a service improvement review, for example?"

He brightened up a little. "Yes! We have a project proposal template. It requires a project team, endorsement from our Transformation Committee, and submission to the Executive Team."

"How many of those projects have been implemented so far?" I asked.

"None," he said.

There it was. A beautiful mural of potential, hanging above a process designed to guarantee nothing would ever change.

When Gorgeous Becomes Delusional

I want to be clear - this article is not about live scribe artistry. I am not knocking talented artists who have the gift of capturing the hopes, commitments, and collective energy of a room. Used well, that kind of visual capture can be genuinely powerful. It can serve as a reference point. A reminder of what the group decided together.

That is not what this was. There is nothing even the most talented artist could have done to fix what was going on in this organisation.

This was an organisation spending significant money to document its own delusion.

Here's what the artwork was telling us, if you knew how to read it. This organisation sat squarely in what I call the Weakness quadrant - high aspiration, high risk. They wanted everything to change. The language on that mural was genuinely ambitious. But they were operating in an environment so risk-averse, so process-heavy, so structurally constrained, that the aspiration had nowhere to go. Every decision required a committee. Every initiative required executive endorsement. Bravery was listed as a leadership attribute because fear was the actual operating mode. Real conversations were on the wall because fake ones dominated the hallways.

The mural wasn't motivational. It was a confession.

The Problem Isn't the Program

Let me tell you what typically happens before an organisation lands on "let's run a leadership development program."

Someone - usually in People and Culture - notices that something isn't right. Engagement is dropping. Turnover is climbing. Milestones aren't being met. Project delivery is falling behind. Decisions are being pushed up the chain, escalating to executive teams for things that should never have left the front line, bogging down the people who should be focused on strategy. Leaders aren't leading. There's friction, noise, political tension. The CEO says something like "we need to invest in our people".

So HR gets to work. They establish a competency framework. Partnering with their facilitator of choice, they book the venue, send out the invites, order the catering - chocolate muffins, because nothing says "we value you" like a muffin over coffee - and bring in a motivational speaker who is excellent at making people feel something for about 48 hours before reality returns.

Maybe they commission a mural.

None of this is the problem, exactly. The problem is that no one has correctly articulated what they're actually trying to fix. The symptoms have been named. The culture hasn't been diagnosed.

I have sat in those rooms - as a CFO, not as a consultant. The ones where decisions get made about the 'people problem.' I've heard the facilitator shortlisting rationale and the budget allocation discussion. The frustrating reality is that when you are the only voice in the room focused on root cause, the conversation moves on without you. Well-intentioned people making well-intentioned decisions about the wrong problem. It is a dynamic I have watched play out more times than I care to count.

That experience is a large part of why I built the Culture Compass™ - a diagnostic framework that identifies the root cause of operational deficiencies rather than defaulting to competency training as the answer. In the words of your people, with lived experience in your true culture, it maps where an organisation actually sits across two perpetual forces: the pull between Vision and Risk on one axis, and Capacity and Aspiration on the other.

Every organisation sits somewhere across these two axes. And, because organisations are living, breathing entities, they never stay there. They grow, they overcome challenges, they succeed and they plateau. The quadrant they occupy at any given moment determines what kind of intervention will actually work. That is why, at the very core, this isn't a training problem. It's a structural and cultural one - and you can't solve it without first knowing where you stand.

When senior leaders are anchored at the strategic level, it can become genuinely difficult to see what's happening in the organisation beneath them. The structures, systems, and decision rights that were built to manage the organisation may actually be working against the very behaviours they're asking people to demonstrate. That gap - between what leaders aspire to and what the organisation is structurally capable of producing - is where leadership development programs go to die. Training smart people in competencies they already possess doesn't fix a system that won't let them use those competencies.

Say It Out Loud

If you are sitting in a leadership forum listening to your peers dispensing verbal diarrhoea, do yourself and everyone in that room a favour.

Ask how. How does this actually work on a Tuesday afternoon when a frontline leader wants to make a decision and needs three levels of approval to do it? What does "brave" look like in a culture that quietly punishes people who raise inconvenient truths? What does "empowered" mean when every good idea requires committee endorsement?

Aspirational language is easy to generate. It also deflects accountability.  Seriously, what is a magic maker?  I can guarantee that nobody in that room could define what it was and yet, everyone would have nodded in agreement.

You cannot empower people by telling them they're empowered. Empowerment is a structural condition, not a motivational statement. It requires clarity about decision-making authority. It requires processes that enable rather than obstruct. It requires leaders who have actually been given room to lead.

If those mechanisms aren't in place, aspirations are what they remain.

Take Stock

If you are a CPO or senior HR leader, I'd ask you to sit with one question before you commission the next program or book the next facilitator.

Have you actually assessed whether your organisation is structurally capable of producing, fostering and sustaining the leadership behaviours you're asking for?

Not "do we believe in our leaders?" Not "is the intent right?" But are the authority frameworks, decision rights, and cultural conditions in place that would allow this to happen?

Do you know where your organisation sits right now across the tensions between vision and risk, and aspiration and capacity - and what that means for the kind of intervention that will actually land?

If you don't, you're not developing leaders. Instead, you're running an exercise in collective wishful thinking.

No doubt, the mural will be beautiful. The room will feel energised. Twelve months later, someone will bring in a consultant wondering why nothing changed.

Do the diagnosis first.

I've put together a short self-diagnostic to help you assess where your organisation sits. If you'd like a copy, reach out. If this landed and you want to talk through what it means for your organisation, let's do that too.