Earlier this year I asked ten senior leaders a simple question. What has the last ninety days really required of you?

The answers came fast. “Things that should be easy are hard.” “I can’t prioritize, because I’m too empathetic to all the requests.” And one that stayed with me for weeks: “I want to develop people. Instead I’ve had to let good people go. And I feel like it’s my fault.”

These were not struggling leaders. They were experienced, capable people running real businesses. And every one of them had quietly concluded that the problem was them.

I have watched this for decades, in hypergrowth companies and steady ones, in first-time CEOs and veterans. Capable people blaming themselves for a condition they did not create. For most of those years I could see the pattern but could not hand anyone the words for it.

This week Harvard Business Review published my article giving the condition its name: Ambient Urgency.

The article makes the case that this is structural, not personal, and it gives leaders three tests for making decisions inside it. I hope you will read it. What I want to add here is the part that matters most to me, and that an article built for frameworks cannot fully hold.

Naming matters. You cannot counter what you cannot see, and you cannot see what you cannot say. As long as the condition stays unnamed, every leader inside it writes their own private story about why they are struggling, and the story is almost always some version of “I am failing.” The moment it has a name, the story changes. It stops being a verdict about you and becomes a fact about the conditions you are leading in.

You are not broken. The system is. Naming it is the first act of taking control back.

Read the article. Then look at your own last ninety days and ask where you see it. Start with your calendar.

The calendar doesn’t lie.

Ambient Urgency by Karen Walker

Everything Is Urgent Now. That's the Problem.