📖 Business
Biz - DecisionTech Case Study
DecisionTech is the fictional Silicon Valley startup at the center of Lencioni's leadership fable. The company has every advantage — more experienced executives, more capital, better technology than its competitors — yet it's falling behind. Revenue is declining, key engineers are leaving, and morale is terrible. The board brings in Kathryn Petersen, a 57-year-old former automotive industry executive with no tech background, as the new CEO. Her diagnosis: the problem isn't strategy, product, or talent. The executive team doesn't function as a team. Everything else is downstream of that failure.
2
Minutes
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Concepts
+45
XP
1
How It Works
Kathryn's diagnostic approach:
She observes the executive team and identifies the classic dysfunction cascade: people don't trust each other, so they avoid real debate, so decisions lack buy-in, so nobody holds anyone accountable, so individuals optimize for their own departments rather than company results.
Her intervention, layer by layer:
- Force vulnerability — At an offsite, she runs a personal histories exercise. Each executive shares their background, childhood challenges, and career path. The exercise is simple but cracks open the performative shell. People start seeing colleagues as humans, not competitors.
- Provoke healthy conflict — In meetings, Kathryn refuses to let artificial harmony stand. When she senses unvoiced disagreement, she calls it out: "I don't think we've actually discussed this." She demands real debate on real issues.
- Demand clear commitments — Every meeting ends with an explicit statement of what was decided. "What did we just agree to? Who's communicating this to their teams?" No more ambiguous nods.
- Enforce accountability — She introduces a public scoreboard of team commitments. Progress is reviewed as a team, not in private 1:1s. Peers begin holding each other to standards.
- Focus on collective results — She establishes one company metric that the entire executive team is accountable for — not departmental targets. Individual success means nothing if the company number doesn't move.
The resistance and breakthrough:
Not everyone makes it. One executive (Mikey) can't adapt to the new culture of vulnerability and accountability, and eventually leaves. The remaining team coalesces, and within a year DecisionTech overtakes its competitors. The lesson: losing a talented individual who undermines team dynamics is a net positive.