You Can’t Discipline Your Way Out of Drift. You Have to Trick Your Way In.

Most executives think the problem with their program is a willpower problem. Enforce the process. Mandate the reporting standard. Hold people accountable in the steering meeting. Eventually, the thinking goes, discipline will win.

It rarely does. And the reason isn’t that your people are weak. It’s that you’re fighting the wrong battle.

The mind — individual or organisational — chases comfort, pleasure, and the appearance of control. Left alone, it will always drift toward whatever costs it the least discomfort right now. That drift is not a moral failing. It’s the default setting. And the very things the mind chases — the comfortable status update, the deferred decision, the report that stays green because no one wants to be the one who turns it red — are the source of the ruin that follows. Programs don’t fail because someone lied. They fail because the path of least resistance was rewarded every week for eighteen months, and nobody noticed until the cost of correction was too high.

So executives try to control it. They write governance frameworks. They add another sign-off. They tell the steering committee to “be more transparent.” And then they watch the same drift happen anyway, because controlling a mind — or a culture — through direct force is exhausting, and exhausted control fails.

If control doesn’t work, the only thing left is to trick it. Not the people — the system they operate inside. You stop trying to will honesty into existence and start designing the environment so that honesty is the easier, more rewarded path. This is not manipulation. It’s stewardship. It’s the same instinct a disciplined person uses on their own mind, applied at the level of an organisation.

Trick it with smaller goals. A transformation program that hangs everything on go-live gives the mind eighteen months to rationalise, defer, and drift, with nothing to correct against until it’s too late. Break the program into checkpoints that force a real answer — not a status colour — every few weeks. Small, honest wins compound. One distant finish line invites exactly the kind of quiet erosion that shows up as a surprise six months before go-live.

Trick it by attaching the hard thing to the identity you want. A council or corporation that wants to be known for governance discipline needs to make that identity visible in the room, not just the values statement. When a Director of Corporate Services stands up in a steering meeting and says “this is off track, and here’s why,” the organisation needs a system that treats that moment as the identity in action — not as a threat to be managed. Say it enough, structure the meeting to reward it enough, and the behaviour becomes who you are rather than something you have to force.

Trick it by rewarding the hard work, not just the outcome. Most programs only celebrate at go-live. Everything before that is treated as overhead. But the person who surfaces a bad vendor number in month four, before it compounds into a $2M variance, has just done the most valuable work in the entire program — and usually gets nothing for it except an uncomfortable meeting. If you want people to keep doing that, the treat has to come after the hard thing, deliberately, every time. Otherwise the mind learns the real lesson fast: silence is safer than honesty.

Trick it by controlling the cues. Executives don’t drift because they decide to hide a problem. They drift because the environment quietly tells them, report after report, that green is safe and red is a conversation nobody wants to have. Change the cue and you change the behaviour without ever mandating it. A status report that makes “amber with a named risk” the expected, unremarkable norm — rather than the exception that triggers alarm — removes the temptation to round up. You are not asking anyone to be braver. You are removing the reason they needed to be.

None of this replaces discipline or hard work. Those still matter — they’re not optional. But discipline and sacrifice are not the same instinct, and conflating them is where most governance frameworks go wrong. Sacrifice asks people to override their nature indefinitely through sheer will. It doesn’t scale, and it doesn’t survive a bad quarter. What scales is designing the smaller, achievable path — the one where doing the hard, honest thing is also the path of least resistance, because you built it that way on purpose.

Perhaps that’s where the real work of leadership starts — not in forcing an organisation to hold a higher standard, but in becoming, deliberately, the kind of leader who tricks the system into holding it anyway.