A Blessed Relief

Why Does Progress Have to Hurt?

Organisations love pain language. Burning platforms. Choke points. Pain points. We’ve somehow accepted that progress requires suffering, that change only happens when things get bad enough.

Queen Victoria thought differently. She’d delivered seven children without anaesthesia and had, by all accounts, strong opinions about it. When her eighth child, Prince Leopold, arrived in 1853, she asked her physician John Snow to administer chloroform. The medical establishment was sceptical. The Church of England objected: labour pain was a biblical mandate!

Victoria wrote in her journal: “That blessed Chloroform!”. And, then, she told everyone.

Overnight, obstetric anaesthesia became respectable across Britain. Not through a health policy paper or a change management programme. Through one leader refusing to accept that pain was a prerequisite for the outcome she wanted.

I think about this when clients tell me their organisation “needs a burning platform” to get people moving. Sometimes they do. More often, they’ve just never seriously asked: what if we made the path easier instead?

Progress doesn’t require pain. It requires leadership willing to say so.

Question: Where in your strategy are you tolerating unnecessary pain, because you’ve quietly assumed it’s part of the deal?

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Flawlessly Fallible

At last.

We had proof this week that AI convinced humans that it was human. Well, 73% of the time. That’s not enough for you? Consider that actual humans were only identified as human 54% of the time.

I’m talking of course about the famed Turing Test. For 75 years, the holy grail of artificial intelligence has been: “Humans can’t tell the difference”.

But here’s the twist the researchers at UC San Diego found most interesting.

The AI didn’t win by being smarter. It won by being worse — strategically. When prompted to ‘be more human’ (do the sorts of things we build into all our ‘normal’ conversations: hesitations, casual humour, minor mistakes) GPT-4.5 passed. Without those instructions, its success rate dropped to 36%.

Which means the most human thing about it was engineered imperfection. Tell it to be fallible and it will be flawlessly fallible.

There’s something deeply funny about that. And something worth observing in the real world.

Like me, you’ve probably watched the same dynamic play out in leadership presentations. The leader who admits uncertainty (“Honestly, we’re not sure about this yet”) lands more credibly than the one with the polished deck and answer for everything.

Authenticity reads as human. But authenticity can also be performed. The Turing test doesn’t tell us how to tell the difference. Neither, it turns out, do we.

Question: In your own leadership, how (and when) can you convey sincere but powerful uncertainty?

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Know Thyself (Or Maybe Not)

Someone close to me was recently asked to join a fitness competition at her gym. Leaderboards, personal bests, attendance streaks. Her first reaction: “I’m not joining that. I can motivate myself.”

She’s confident. Definitive. Self-aware.

But guess what happened? Her instructor quietly enrolled her anyway.

Within a week: “I had no idea how competitive I was. Now I’m in, I want to win.”

Behavioural economists have a name for this. Social comparison bias: the unconscious drive to close the gap between where we are and where others around us are.

It’s one of the most powerful motivators we have. And one of the most underused. And where it’s used, it works brilliantly.

Houston Methodist Hospital introduced surgeon-specific performance dashboards: individual outcomes, visible across peer groups. Quality improved dramatically. Not because anyone told surgeons to lift their game. But because nobody (especially not a Type-A personality doctor!) wants to be at the bottom of a leaderboard their peers can read.

When I worked as an employment consultant, I only ever had ONE jobseeker ask me: “How many jobs have you found? Who’s better than you around here? I want to work with them”. That alone motivated me to track my performance, and want to be on ‘top of the leaderboard’.

The lesson isn’t subtle. If you lead a service delivery organisation, a government agency, a university, and you want people to perform at their best, stop asking what motivates them. Show them where they stand alongside others.

Question: What would change in your organisation if performance was genuinely visible — to everyone?

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In the week ahead, know thyself, avoid unnecessary suffering, and be as imperfectly human as you can be.

And drop me a heart so I can be motivated to do the same.

See you next Friday,

Andrew

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