The most capable leaders often hit a wall not from lack of skill or effort, but from what sociologist Diane Vaughan called 'practical drift' — the slow, invisible accumulation of small normalizations, where each tiny departure from original intent seems harmless until the whole structure has quietly shifted. Vaughan identified this in her landmark study of the Challenger disaster: no single engineer made a catastrophic choice; the catastrophe emerged from dozens of routine accommodations that each felt reasonable in isolation. For leaders pursuing clarity and achievement, this is the less-obvious threat — not the bold mistake, but the gradual erosion of what you actually meant to build. The antidote Vaughan's analysis implies isn't more willpower or a stronger agenda. It's periodic, deliberate re-comparison with original intent — asking not 'are we doing well?' but 'are we still doing what we originally decided was worth doing, and why did we decide that?'

Name one standard in your work or home life that you privately know has quietly slipped from what you originally intended — and identify the first small accommodation that started it.

Drawing from Organizational Sociology (Normalization of Deviance) — Diane Vaughan (The Challenger Launch Decision, 1996)