False North

A compass is always supposed to point to true north.

But put a strong enough magnet nearby, and the needle swings toward that instead. The compass still looks like it's working. You still feel like you're navigating. But you're oriented to the wrong signal, and you won't realize it until you're miles off course.

I've seen this happen numerous times to product teams. The magnet is often an executive.

Mid-career I joined an enterprise-stage company and on literally my third day, my team turned to me in a meeting and asked me to make a critical decision. Not because I had context — I'd been there less than 72 hours. Because I was the highest-ranking person in the room.

I looked at them and said, "I have no idea what's going on compared to you. You tell me what we should be doing."

Their discomfort was visceral. These were smart, experienced people. They had opinions. They had data. But somewhere along the way, they'd learned that "right" meant "what the senior-most person thinks." Take away that signal, as I was doing in that moment by refusing to make an uninformed decision, and they felt lost. Their compass was pointing at me, and I'd barely learned where the bathrooms were.

What False North looks like

This problem is often talked about in the framework of executive control, for example the “Throne Room” metaphor in Ben Foster and Rajesh Nerlikar’s Build What Matters. I.e. “If the executive would just stop insisting on making every decision, the organization will function more effectively.”

But False North is as much about the team's reaction as the executive's behavior. It's when the team's entire orientation shifts from "what's true" to "what does the exec want." The dysfunction runs even when the exec isn't part of the conversation.

You'll hear it in the language:

• "That's a great idea, but she won't go for it, so let's not bother."

• "We know he wants X, not Y, so there's no point in testing."

• "Let's wait until we can get sign-off before we move forward."

Translation: we've stopped navigating by customers, data, or reality. We're navigating by the exec's presumed preferences. Every decision is filtered through "will they approve?" before it's evaluated on its merits.

The result is a team in permanent holding pattern. Nothing is finalized until explicit executive sign-off is obtained. The only progress anyone makes is the kind that's easy to reverse. The energy is anxious, cautious, defensive. Constant worry that "we might get this wrong", where "wrong" means "the exec disagrees."

I once worked for a startup CEO once who operated like this. If he didn't agree with your proposal or findings, he'd simply tell you they were wrong. Go back and do it again. Reach the right conclusion this time. But he wouldn't explain his thinking and wouldn't engage with your reasoning. If you presented data that contradicted his view, he'd tell you your source was wrong, even if that source was customers, directly, telling us what they needed. The only winning move was to figure out what he already believed and then "discover" it yourself.

Was he a bad person? I don't think so. I think he felt tremendous pressure to succeed, and he wasn't ready to accept the vulnerability that comes with letting go. Probably some arrogance mixed in: strong academic pedigree, used to being the smartest person in the room. But mostly, I think he was scared. Scared that if he wasn't the one making every call, something important would get missed.

The tragedy is that his fear created the exact outcome he was trying to prevent. The team stopped bringing him real information. Why would they? It just got rejected. So he ended up making decisions in an information vacuum, surrounded by people telling him what he wanted to hear.

The corruption at the center

Here's what makes False North different from ordinary micromanagement:

In a healthy organization, people are accountable for making good decisions. You gather information, weigh trade-offs, make a call, and live with the outcome. If it works, great. If it doesn't, you learn something. Under False North, people become accountable for making decisions the exec agrees with. Those are completely different things.

When your job is to match the exec's conclusion, you're not really deciding anything, you're attuning. And when the exec isn't around to provide the signal, the lack of attunement forces you to guess. You have no compass. The whole concept of "right" has become untethered from reality and attached to a person. I've watched smart, capable people become paralyzed by this. Not because they lacked judgment, but because they'd been trained (through repetition, reward, and/or punishment) that their judgment didn't matter. Only the exec's did.

That's not a management problem. That's a reality distortion field.

The stakes

Maybe this sounds dramatic. Let me tell you what I've personally experienced.

I've been part of two startups that operated this way. One went out of business entirely. The other sold for pennies on the dollar. In both cases, the team had stopped telling leadership the truth, because the truth wasn't what leadership wanted to hear. By the time reality became undeniable, it was too late.

I’ve also worked at several enterprise companies that operated this way, and the pattern at this scale is different but equally destructive. You see rapid promotion of people who are particularly good at reading execs’ preferences and reflecting them back. You also see repeated, costly churn at the top (CEOs fired, strategies abandoned) because nobody underneath was empowered to flag problems early, so wasteful initiatives compound until there’s nothing left to do but blame and fire a key executive. The organization becomes optimized for internal alignment rather than external reality.

And at every level, you see talented people leave. Not because they can't do the work, but because they've realized their judgment will never matter here.

The way out

If you're an exec reading this and wondering if you've created a False North environment, here's the uncomfortable truth: you may not be able to tell from the inside. The whole point is that people have stopped giving you unfiltered information. They're telling you what you want to hear. If what you hear consistently reinforces your own world view, but the results do not, that may be your only sign.

So how do you break out?

In my experience, it starts with structured exposure to reality that doesn't depend on your team's willingness to disagree with you. User research is often the lever. Not summaries or surveys — actual conversations with customers, ideally ones you observe directly.

As a Fractional CPO hired into companies like this, what I've seen happen, consistently, is that a few hours of real customer exposure reveals something that contradicts a core assumption the exec has been holding. And because it's coming directly from customers, and not from a team member who could be dismissed, or intimidated, or playing politics, it lands differently.

That's the crack in the wall. That's the moment where the exec realizes, "Huh. I was really sure about that, and I was wrong."

The beautiful thing is, this doesn't have to be a humiliation. It can actually be a win. The exec brought in experts. The experts found critical insights. The company is now smarter. The exec looks better for having created the conditions for truth to surface.

And there's often an accompanying reaction: relief. Being the only person who can make decisions is exhausting. When an exec realizes they can let go of that burden, and that they can look smart by enabling good decisions rather than making every decision, something unclenches.

However, this relief may or may not be shared by the team. Some people will jump at the opportunity for their insights and opinions to matter again; others will be more cautious, even scared. It's not as simple as the exec announcing "I value objective truth now" and expecting the team to fall in line. Incentives, habits, and thought processes have been trained over months or years. They must be retrained and reinforced, and that takes time. In extreme cases, the team may need to be entirely re-hired if they've become too entrenched in the attunement dynamic. Some people have built their careers on reading the room rather than reading the market, and they may not be capable of operating any other way.

Consistent reinforcement is critical. Even a slight backslide by the executive, one override delivered in a moment of stress or impatience, can undo months of progress. The team is watching for signs that this is real, and they will find the evidence they're looking for in either direction. The best executives I've seen accomplish this transition have intentionally taken a back seat, staying silent on decisions as much as possible to give their team space to grow. Not because they had nothing to contribute, but because their silence was the only way to prove that the team's judgment actually mattered.

Recalibrating

If you're on a team that's pointing False North, I won't pretend this is easy to fix from your position. You can't single-handedly change the incentive structure. But you can start to notice when you're self-censoring. When you're optimizing for "what will get approved" rather than "what's true." When you're hedging your recommendation to make it more palatable rather than more accurate. You can ask yourself: if I knew for certain the exec would agree with whatever I said, what would I actually recommend?

That's your compass trying to find true north again.

The critical question

Here's what I'd want to ask any exec who suspects this might be happening:

When was the last time someone on your team told you that you were wrong about something important, and you changed your mind?

If you can't remember, that's not because you're always right. It's because the magnetic field around you has gotten so strong that every compass in the building is pointing at you instead of at reality.