The curious ways we convince ourselves, and each other, that the emperor is beautifully dressed.

I sat in a leadership team meeting recently and listened to the conversation around the table. There was a palpable sense of pride in the organisation. People spoke about the great work their teams were doing, how hard everyone was working, and the innovative solutions they were developing. There was genuine enthusiasm for what they were achieving, and it was wonderful to listen to.

The only problem was that I’d recently experienced this same organisation as a customer, and my experience bore little resemblance to the one being described. So of course, I mentioned it. I shared what my experience had been like, and the gap between what I was hearing in the room and what I’d encountered as a customer.

Now I know one customer’s experience never tells the whole story, and perhaps mine was unusual. But it did make me wonder how often two versions of an organisation coexist. The one experienced by the people who work there, and the one experienced by the people they’re there to serve. And how often do those leading the organisation get to hear both?

It reminded me of Hans Christian Andersen’s famous story, The Emperor’s New Clothes. Two swindlers convince a vain emperor they can make him a magnificent suit of clothes, invisible to anyone who is stupid or incompetent. Neither the emperor nor his ministers can see the fabric, but nobody dares admit it. Eventually, he parades through the streets wearing absolutely nothing, while the crowd marvels at his magnificent outfit. Until a child points out the obvious. “The Emperor has no clothes!”

It’s a story about vanity, conformity and the fear of looking foolish. But what happens when we repeat a story so often, surrounded by people who repeat it back to us, that we eventually start believing our own bullsh*t?

I’ve spent much of my career inside large organisations, and I’ve seen versions of this play out many times. A business becomes convinced its products or services are exceptional. Leaders talk about their market-leading offering, customer-centric culture and innovative approach. The messages are repeated at conferences, in strategy presentations and town halls. Employees absorb the language and repeat it themselves.

And of course we want our people to believe in what we’re doing, but somewhere along the way, belief can become a substitute for evidence. An organisation can become remarkably good at describing how wonderful it is, while customers may be having a rather different experience.

I wonder whether part of the problem is how information travels. A customer’s frustration becomes a service metric. An operational failure becomes an improvement initiative. Employee dissatisfaction becomes an engagement score with a reassuring action plan.

With each layer of reporting, some of the uncomfortable reality can be sanitised or disappear altogether. People want to demonstrate progress and reassure their leaders, and organisations tend to reward those with answers rather than uncomfortable questions. So the information gets filtered, the story gets polished, and the people with the greatest responsibility can find themselves with the least exposure to what’s actually happening.

There’s also an interesting psychological phenomenon called pluralistic ignorance, where people privately doubt something but mistakenly believe everyone else agrees with it. Imagine a leadership team endorsing a strategy that several members privately question, but nobody challenges because everyone assumes they’re the only one with doubts. By the end of the meeting, there’s unanimous support for a decision that perhaps nobody was entirely convinced about. And once publicly endorsed, it becomes even harder to question.

Resources are committed, reputations attached and careers built around delivering decisions. We see it in politics too, where policies can become so closely associated with those championing them that reconsidering their merit feels like admitting failure. Conviction matters, of course. But there’s a difference between principled conviction and becoming attached to being right.

I suspect we all do this. We build narratives about who we are, what we’re good at and how the world works. They become part of our identity, and when something challenges them, we don’t always respond with curiosity. I’ve certainly caught myself doing it over the years. Holding onto a view longer than I should have, explaining away information that didn’t fit, or being so convinced I understood something that I stopped asking questions. Experience gives us confidence and pattern recognition, but it can also make us remarkably good at rationalising our own assumptions.

Which brings me back to that leadership meeting. I don’t doubt the sincerity of the people around the table or the good work that was being done. I raised my experience because I wondered what else might become visible if we spent a little less time discussing what the organisation was doing and a little more time exploring what it was actually like to experience it. The point isn’t to catch people out, but to see what we might be missing.

Perhaps one of the most valuable things a leader can do is create the conditions in which someone can point out that the emperor is naked, without being made to feel foolish. But there’s an even more difficult responsibility. Being willing to consider that we might be the emperor. That the strategy we’ve championed might no longer be right, the product we’re proud of might not be as good as we think, or the story we’ve been telling ourselves might need updating.

It takes a certain kind of confidence to hold our convictions firmly enough to act on them, but lightly enough to change them. So the question I’ll leave you with is this:

What am I so convinced is true that I’ve stopped being curious about whether it actually is?