Your follow-through is the real liability.

Here’s the reality most leaders avoid: your best ideas aren’t failing. Your follow-through is.

You leave a powerful session sharp and energised. Then the diary fills, noise takes over, and before you know it, you’re back in business as usual, telling yourself you’ll come back to it later.

Momentum sticks only when three things are in place:

• An accountability partner focused on execution, not just enthusiasm.
• A real action plan with dates, decisions, and named owners.
• One clear leader driving it forward when energy dips.

Without these, insight stays theoretical. With them, change becomes unavoidable.

Insight is expensive without accountability.

I once ran a session with a leadership team. Big ideas, tough truths. One leader said, “This changes everything.”

Three months later? Nothing had changed. Same behaviours, same bottlenecks, same frustrations.

What was missing? Accountability.

Someone keeping the heat on, asking the hard questions, and holding the line when business as usual tried to take over.

Insight alone is fragile. Enthusiasm expires fast without follow-through.

Urgency, on its own, is not dangerous.

Here is the real learning I have taken from watching this play out inside organisations and inside leaders.

Speed is not choice. Urgency becomes harmful when action happens without trade-offs. When leaders keep adding “urgent” without removing anything, they’re really saying:

“I cannot choose.”

“I will not push back.”

“I am not willing to disappoint the person above me.”

Every urgent request tests leadership: can you define value, protect focus, and make trade-offs?

The lesson isn’t “slow down.” It’s choose: what matters, what stops, what gets pushed back.