“You’ve lost your edge,” the new VP declared. Just eight months ago, the same contrarian thinking had earned my client the company’s innovation award.
Same brain, same approach, different verdict. What changed?
I’ve been on both ends of the performance/perception spectrum myself. One year I was the golden child who could do no wrong. The next, under different leadership, those same approaches made me “difficult.” Same work, very different interpretations.
Corporate success operates more like quantum physics than we want to admit —the observer shapes the reality being observed.
What does this mean for leaders? Flipping the script — how does your organization and leadership perceive you?
This is a multi-part series. In today’s edition, I examine how leadership observation shapes organizational reality — like opening (or not opening) the quantum box of Schrödinger’s Cat.
In Part 2, I’ll show how the cat, rather than being passive, actively creates its own “organizational box.” In follow-up editions, we’ll look at strategies for tackling these conundrums.
In Leadership and the New Science, Margaret Wheatley writes:
Schrodinger’s cat is a classic thought problem in quantum physics. Physicist Erwin Schrödinger constructed the problem in 1935 …. We cannot know what is happening to something if we are not looking at it, and, stranger yet, nothing does happen to it until we observe it. …
The problem of the cat has not yet been resolved, but here is the thought experiment. A live cat is placed in a box. The box has solid walls, so no one outside the box can see into it. This is a crucial factor, since the thought experiment explores the role of the observer in evoking reality. Inside the box, a device will trigger the release of either poison or food; the probability of either occurrence is 50/50. Time passes. The trigger goes off, unobserved. The cat meets its fate.
Or does it?
Just as an electron is both a wave and a particle until our observation causes it to collapse as either a particle or wave, Schrödinger argues that the cat is both alive and dead until the moment we observe it. Inside the box, when no one is watching, the cat exists only as a probability wave. It is possible to calculate mathematically (as a Schrödinger wave function) all of the cat’s possible states. But it is impossible to say that the cat is living or dead until we observe it. It is the act of observation that determines the collapse of the cat’s wave function and makes it either dead or alive. Before we peer in, the cat exists as probabilities. Our curiosity kills the cat. Or brings it back.
…
I realized I had been living in a Schrödinger’s cat world in every organization I had ever been in. Each of these organizations had myriad boxes, drawn in endless renderings of organizational charts. Within each of those boxes lay a “cat,” a human being, rich in potential, whose fate was determined, always and irrevocably, by the act of observation.
It is common to speak of self-fulfilling prophecies and the impact these have on people’s behavior. If a manager is told that a new trainee is particularly gifted, that manager will see genius emerging from the trainee’s mouth even in obscure statements. But if the manager is told that his or her new hire is a bit slow on the uptake, the manager will interpret a brilliant idea as a sure sign of sloppy thinking or obfuscation.
From studies on the impact of opportunity in organizations… we know that the “anointed” in organizations, those high flyers who move quickly through the ranks, are given at least some of their wings through our desire to observe them as winners. We endow their ideas and words with more credibility. We entrust them with more resources and better assignments. We have already decided that they will succeed, so we continually observe them with the expectation that they will confirm our beliefs.
Others in organizations go unobserved, forever invisible, bundles of potential that no one bothers to look at. Or they receive summary glances, are observed to be “dead,” and are thereafter locked into jobs that provide them with no opportunity to display any new potential. In the quantum world, what you see is what you get. In human organizations, we play with Schrödinger’s cat daily, determining the fate of all of us—our quality of aliveness or deadness—by what we decide to observe in one another. So it is not only quantum physicists who have to deal with the enigmas of observation. The observation problem is as real for us as it is for them.
Schrodinger’s cat and the problem of observation pad quietly around our organizations in many forms. … Every time we go to measure something, we interfere. A quantum wave function builds and builds in possibilities until the moment of measurement, when its future collapses into only one aspect. Which aspect of that wave function comes forth is largely determined by what we decide to measure.
For leaders, being alert to the observation dilemma is critically important. Management is addicted to numbers, taking frequent pulses of the organization in surveys, monthly progress checks, quarterly reports, yearly evaluations. It is important to stay aware to the realization that no form of measurement is neutral.Every act of measurement loses more information than it gains.
So how can we ensure that we obtain sound information to make intelligent decisions? How can we know what is the right information to look for? How can we remain open to the information we lost when we went looking for the information we got?
We don’t often allow these questions to surface in organizations. We tend to focus on a few key indicators, or the opinions of those we trust. We worry more about the accuracy of the small bits of information we have and how best to analyze them than about the huge amounts of information we lose. Even when we attempt to look for data that are new and different, we still act as though that data exists “out there” and that we just have to find the appropriate lens or expert to get it.
Wheatley penned these lines in 1992 when complexity science was still “new.” Thirty years later, despite work becoming exponentially more complex, most organizations still cling to linear, predictable, “if-then” leadership approaches.
We've traded mechanical watches for smart ones, but our mental models remain stubbornly Newtonian: organizations as simple machines rather than living systems.
Consider the daily challenges we face both as leaders and followers.
(1) Perception defines who is “alive”.
People are placed in “boxes”—roles, reputations, and assumptions defining their perceived value. Some are actively observed and nurtured, while others remain unseen, like unmeasured quantum states. The choice of whom to watch, invest in, and include in key conversations determines who thrives and who “dies.”
When only the usual suspects receive attention, fresh ideas and unconventional talent remain untapped. Over time, this selective observation turns into a culture where certain roles, units, and personality types are valued while others fade into oblivion. Invisibility is self-reinforcing: no attention means no proof of excellence, leading to more invisibility.
(2) Observation actively shapes reality.
Just as an unobserved quantum particle exists in multiple states, people and teams exist in multiple potential versions until leadership collapses them into a single identity. When leaders see someone as a “high performer,” they direct resources, attention, and opportunities toward them, reinforcing that reality. Conversely, those who remain unobserved stagnate—not due to lack of potential, but because no one has evoked it.
Leaders define what is considered “real” and valuable. Strategic focus comes at a cost—some things will be left unexamined, unmeasured, and undervalued. The danger is failing to acknowledge the consequences of what’s not being seen.
Every measurement eliminates more than it captures, creating blind spots in decision-making.
(3) Measurement changes the game itself.
Performance evaluations and metrics don’t reflect reality as much as they alter it. Measurement is interference.
As smart humans, when we know we’re being measured, we alter our behavior. This means no assessment tool is purely objective; it always introduces distortion. The more an organization relies on measurement alone, the more it risks optimizing for what can be measured rather than what truly matters.
Over time, you end up running an organization by numbers that only hint at the bigger picture. Or worse, hide the real picture.
(4) Leadership is about holding tension.
Newtonian thinking pushes us toward certainty, predictability, and singular truths. Systems thinking, by contrast, demands comfort with uncertainty and ambiguity. Effective leaders don’t rush to collapse possibilities; they hold the tension of multiple potential futures, allowing the path to evolve rather than forcing premature conclusions. Keats’ “negative capability” captures this notion well.
(5) Evoking, not just controlling.
Leadership is often seen as directing and controlling, but it’s also about evoking and releasing potential. Effective leaders don’t necessarily impose order on chaos but instead enable the conditions for patterns to emerge. Just as particles behave differently under observation, people and teams respond to leadership, shaping their performance based on expectations, support, and reinforcement.
(6) Participative intelligence
The universe’s participative nature shows that reality is co-created, not dictated. In organizations, breakthroughs happen from broad participation, not top-down control. When only a select few interpret data and make decisions, they collapse possibilities into a narrow reality. In contrast, expanding participation in decision-making preserves the system’s complexity, increasing robustness.
Companies often approach strategy like a blueprint—fixed, linear, and predictive. However, systems are inherently uncertain, and outcomes are shaped by interaction. Strategy is a living, participatory process, continuously shaped by those engaging with it rather than a static plan imposed from above. Thomas Friedman called this tension Carlson’s law:
Innovation that happens from the top down tends to be orderly but dumb. Innovation that happens from the bottom up tends to be chaotic but smart.
Rethinking leadership
Schrödinger’s cat reminds us that we’re not separate from what we observe—we’re an integral part of it. We think we’re just seeing what’s out there, but in fact we’re co-creating it by choosing how, when, and what we observe.
Observation isn’t passive or neutral. It actively sculpts reality and is generative.
Leaders decide who thrives, who remains hidden, what counts as success, and which realities become “official.” Thus effective leadership is also about staying open to “rich small data” that traditional metrics and big data miss.
In Part 2, I'll show how the cat, rather than being passive, actively creates its own "organizational box."