When strategy forgets its humanity

The Leadership Lemming Effect shows up when tough decisions become routine and people quietly become acceptable losses.

This post unpacks how strategic language can desensitize us to harm, and why ethical leadership means holding the human impact, not just the numbers.

Why 'acceptable loss' is a line leaders should stop normalizing

“There are ten people we will lose. But we can save a hundred.”

It sounds philosophical.
It sounds rational.
It sounds responsible.

And in many organizations, this logic lives quietly beneath the surface.
Not in slogans or values but in the way, decisions are made under pressure.

It rarely announces itself.
It slips in as strategy.

When people become collateral

Most of the time, it doesn’t sound cruel.
It sounds like:

• “The transformation will be painful, but necessary.”

• “Growth always comes with sacrifices.”

• “Not everyone will come with us into the future.”

At first, these phrases sound pragmatic.
They reflect ambition. Urgency. Resolve.

But over time, they become routine.
And eventually, no one asks the question that matters:

Who decided this was acceptable?
And what happens when we stop noticing the cost?

From responsibility to calculation

At a certain point, language shifts.
It moves from care to calculation.
From accountability to abstraction.

And the people affected stop being:

• Colleagues

• Teams

• Families

…and become:

• Attrition models

• Risk forecasts

• Efficiency metrics

When that shift goes unchecked, strategy may still look effective.
But it starts losing its integrity.

The logic that silently grows

This isn’t about malice.
In large, high-pressure systems, decision-making often narrows under stress.

What matters is what’s measurable.
What fits the timeline.
What looks manageable on the dashboard.

This is what organizational theorist Herbert Simon called bounded rationality —
when decisions are made within the limits of what seems good enough, fast enough, efficient enough.

It’s easy to think:
“We’ve done the math.”
“We’ve accepted the trade-offs.”

And slowly, the ethical weight of those choices fades.

What happens in the real world

We’ve seen what happens when this mindset becomes operational.

At Boeing, internal safety warnings were deprioritized to meet delivery targets.
The product shipped.
Then two planes went down.
346 people died.

The tragedy wasn’t caused by a single decision.
It was the result of rational trade-offs made inside a system that rewarded speed over pause.

In the UK’s National Health Service, years of transformation fatigue, budget pressure, and restructuring led to widespread staff burnout.
Not because anyone intended harm.
But because the system couldn’t make space to protect its own people.

My line in the sand

As a communicator, I’ve spent years helping organizations navigate change.
I’ve supported difficult messages, designed leadership narratives, and translated strategy into action.

But I no longer support the idea that certain people can quietly be absorbed as the cost of doing business.

Because I’ve seen what happens when that logic becomes culture.
It spreads. It numbs.
And eventually, no one remembers where the line was drawn.

At the same time, I’ve also seen what it looks like when leaders carry the weight of hard decisions with integrity.

A colleague of mine, a newly hired VP, was asked to reduce headcount as his first act in the role.
Instead of distancing himself, he stepped forward.

He began by identifying employees approaching retirement and invited conversations.
Not as a checklist but as a way of offering choice and protecting dignity.

He didn’t delegate the message.
He held town halls, explained the situation openly, and answered questions himself.

He spoke plainly.
Not to soften the decision but to make space for the people affected by it.

The outcome didn’t change.
But the way it was handled changed how people experienced it.

That kind of leadership doesn’t erase the impact.
But it shows that clarity and care can exist in the same sentence.
And it proves that responsibility doesn’t weaken authority - it earns it.

The quiet question

Not:

“How many can we save?”

But:

“What kind of leader do we become when we stop asking who is being lost?”

Because the real test of strategy isn’t how quickly it moves.
It’s whether the people carrying it remain whole enough to keep believing in it.

#Leadership #HumanCenteredChange #StrategicCommunication #OrganizationalIntegrity