by Developmental | Oct 21, 2026 | Stories
In a game of Monopoly, do not pass go, do not collect $200, go straight to jail. It costs you a couple of turns while everyone else moves on. In a business, that’s what a lost engineer, a stalled project or a workers’ compensation claim actually feels like: standing still while the revenue keeps draining away.
That sense of detachment is what I see in boards who don’t keep their finger on the pulse. Executives who rely on lag indicators to determine strategy aren’t looking at the whole board, the whole playing field. What reaches the table is harm that has already happened, in claims, turnover and incident reports. By then the money has gone and the chance to prevent it went with it. Leading indicators work the other way, tracking the work itself so unsafe conditions show up before anyone lands on them.
Nobody really wins Monopoly by counting the money at the end, since the game is decided much earlier by what you noticed and what you did about it. In a business your people are the asset, so the real question is what are the conditions your board can’t see and what is it costing you to be detached from what’s happening?
Read What the Board Doesn’t See Here
by Developmental | Oct 21, 2026 | Papers
Playing Monopoly with my brother was a no win situation because he was so good at it, though what really dented my game was being sent to jail. Do not pass go, do not collect $200, and sit there watching everyone else move.
The thing about Monopoly is that every player can see the whole board. Nobody hides a street or quietly leaves a hotel off the table. In most organisations, the board sees something rather different: a carefully assembled view, arriving well after the events it describes.
When the Australian Human Rights Commission surveyed ASX200 companies for its report Equality Across the Board, only 19 per cent said the board held primary accountability for preventing and responding to sexual harassment, with most placing that responsibility on the CEO or the head of human resources. There’s a certain naivety in assuming that someone else is looking after harassment and bullying, and it becomes expensive once people get hurt.
Benjamin Franklin gave us “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” back in 1736, so the idea has had plenty of time to bed in.
What reaches the table
The reports that reach the table are a choice made long before the meeting.
Photo: Vlada Karpovich, Pexels (pexels-vlada-karpovich-7433847)
It’s in our nature to trust the reporting systems we’ve used for years because they’ve always seemed to work. The question worth asking is what the operational risk becomes, for a board member or a senior leader, if the data arriving on the table is incomplete. I do feel for boards, weighed down as they are by financial and compliance reporting, while the people risk, which carries exactly the same weight, is often the one nobody is watching.
Whether you employ fifty people or five thousand, your biggest asset is your people, so you need to know what’s really happening in the day to day work of your organisation. Governance accountability points directly at the board. It takes a great deal for someone to leave a job they’ve invested in, which is why staff turnover, a lag indicator, tells you about harm long after the moment when you could have prevented it.
Seeing harm before it lands
A leading indicator works differently because it tracks the work itself, exposing unsafe conditions before harm occurs.
Lag indicators tell you harm has happened; leading indicators track the work itself.
Many everyday conditions contribute to workplace stress and cause real harm without ever looking unusual or catastrophic, so they slip under the radar. Incivility, micro-harassment, the slow erosion of belonging, racism, the denial of career progression and a lack of equity all wear away at trust and lead to disengagement.
Operational risk that comes with employing people belongs on the agenda at every board meeting.
Ticking the box
Tick box activity produces a green, ‘all is well’, dashboard that tells the board its boxes are ticked rather than whether its people are safe. Survey results that never see the light of day are another favourite form of box ticking. They do more damage than people realise, since asking for views then doing nothing with them teaches everyone that speaking up changes nothing and people feel they’ve been set up to fail. What closes the gap is the questions the board asks once the right data is in front of it, along with the actions they take to mitigate the risk.
What you see as a board member is a choice the organisation made long before the report reached the table. That report needs to include the measures being taken to prevent harm, not simply the incidents that have already occurred.
Nobody wins by counting the money
Nobody really wins Monopoly by counting the money at the end, since the game is decided much earlier by what you noticed then did something about. Boardrooms work in much the same way and that’s where the analogy stops being a game: the money on the table gets the attention while the assets that generate it are left to fend for themselves. In a business your people are those assets, so the losses show up as people rather than paper.
Key points
What’s happening now
Boards are shown lag indicators, which report harm after it has happened.
Everyday conditions such as incivility and the erosion of belonging rarely reach formal reporting.
A green dashboard shows compliance activity rather than evidence that prevention is working.
What reaches the board is a choice made long before the meeting.
What makes the difference
Add leading indicators that track the work itself, such as workload, role clarity, how long concerns take to resolve and whether consultation leads to action.
Ask what isn’t in the report, and why.
Put psychosocial risk on the agenda at every meeting rather than after an incident.
Require information regarding the prevention measures taken, not only the incidents recorded.
Give managers the support they need, since they hold the system together.
My White Paper, Systems that Cause Harm in the Workplace: How to Redesign them for Psychological Safety, goes deeper into these systems and gives real insights into the redesign.
Sources
Australian Human Rights Commission, Equality Across the Board: Investing in Workplaces that Work for Everyone (2021), commissioned by the Australian Council of Superannuation Investors.
Header photo: mibernaa, Pexels. Boardroom photo: Vlada Karpovich, Pexels. Lag versus leading indicators graphic: DevelopMental Safety and Wellbeing.
by Developmental | Sep 20, 2026 | Insights
What a Formula 1 crew and a children’s hospital can teach us about work design
Photo: “2012 Italian GP – Ferrari pit” by Francesco Crippa, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0 (resized)
In one second, two seconds, perhaps a fraction more, a Formula 1 pit crew changes all four tyres on a car, a feat that’s impossibly slick and vital to the success of the team.
What if that amazing system became a model for your business? How do they achieve that magical process where you can hardly see the individual movements? The team functions as one entity while the process simply flows.
Look closely at a pit stop and you’ll see the ‘spotter’, someone who appears to be doing nothing at all yet is absolutely vital to future success, because that person knows every step of the process intimately and can see when milliseconds are lost.
The fast car is king and the driver gets the kudos, while the team makes it happen because their systems are so well designed.
From the pit stop to the operating theatre
The room was wowed when Dom Thurbon told the story of paediatric cardiac surgeon Professor Martin Elliott, not just because of the many lives he saved but because of his ‘Ah ha’ moment when he likened an operating theatre to a Formula 1 team in the pits, surrounding a car that needs ‘treatment’.
Photo: RDNE Stock Project, Pexels
Babies at London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital were too often in trouble during the transfer to intensive care, so Martin turned to the Ferrari team to help work out why. Long story short, the problem fell back on the team: the culture surrounding a senior surgeon had stifled the complaints that might have provided insights, because there was no psychological safety to raise them. Ferrari were scathing, pointing out that their own success was founded on truth.1
The redesigned handover that followed made a measurable difference, with technical errors falling from an average of 5.42 per handover to 3.15, while omissions of information almost halved, from 2.09 to 1.07.2
Nothing about the doctors’ skill had changed; the difference came from how the work was designed and whether people felt safe to speak up.
This really resonated with me, because it’s a powerful reminder that we need to fix systems, not people.
What this means for your workplace
If you want your team to be at the top of their game, it’s time to look at the systems that help them to be ‘in the flow’:
- clear work design pathways that still acknowledge the need for flexibility
- a curated employee journey, from the wording of the job ad through to ongoing mentoring and the appraisal, so that growth is a slick, productive process rather than something left to chance
- a ‘spotter’ who sees the whole system, noticing what’s slowing the team down without judgement and teaching others to notice it too
When I work with a team, I take on the spotter’s role as facilitator, then teach people to take it over themselves, so the system keeps running smoothly long after I’ve stepped back.
When I’ve used the F1 model in my presentations, I’ve watched the ‘Ah ha’ moment arrive for lots of people in the room. There’s a recognition that underpinning success is the care and attention given to the systems that carry everyone through the working day.
Presenting at the AHRI WA Conference 2026
Six systems that prevent psychological harm
My white paper, Systems that Cause Harm in the Workplace: How to Redesign them for Psychological Safety, draws on 22 interviews and four case studies, including my own pilot study, to pinpoint six systems that, working together, can prevent psychological harm.
Who’s your spotter?
A pit stop doesn’t happen by accident, since hours of design, practice and review sit behind every two seconds on the track. The same is true at work, where the systems your people rely on every day will either carry them through or quietly wear them down.
Who in your team can see the whole system, and is it safe for them to say what they notice?
If you’d like to explore the six systems in more depth, the executive summary of my white paper is a great place to start.
Get your Free Executive Summary
Sources
- Dom Thurbon, To Be Honest… (Major Street Publishing, 2026). Story used with permission.
- K. Catchpole et al., ‘Patient handover from surgery to intensive care: using Formula 1 pit-stop and aviation models to improve safety and quality’, Paediatric Anaesthesia, 2007, vol. 17, no. 5, pp. 470-478.
Cover photo: “2012 Italian GP – Ferrari pit” by Francesco Crippa, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY 2.0 (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0). Image resized.
Operating theatre photo: Dave Garcia, Pexels. Hospital team photo: RDNE Stock Project, Pexels.
