What the engineers knew.

Hi Reader

On the morning of January 28th 1986, engineers at Morton Thiokol had already said what needed to be said.

The O-rings on the Space Shuttle Challenger would fail in cold temperatures. They had the data and had made the case. The night before the launch they had recommended, formally, that it be delayed.

By morning that recommendation was gone. The data hadn't changed but pressure from above had and it didn't leave room for the answer the engineers were sitting on. So the people who knew said something different. Or said nothing at all. And the shuttle launched into 28-degree air. And then, as history shows, a catastrophe.

What happened in that room the night before wasn't a failure of knowledge or competence but something quieter and harder to name. And if you've ever sat through a sales/pipeline meeting where everyone in the room knew the real number and nobody said it, then you already know what it was.

Investor value or great sales function & customer experience. Your call.

There is a pattern you might be familiar with in growth-stage companies and it's worth some focus precisely because it almost never gets named at all.

It starts with investor pressure arriving from the top. Which is fine because that's the deal when you take investment. What's less fine is what happens as that pressure filters downward through the business. It doesn't stay at founder level. It travels. And by the time it reaches the commercial team it has changed the nature of every conversation happening inside the business.

The sales team reads the pressure before anyone articulates it. They're good at that; commercial people are, by necessity, readers of rooms and situations. They understand, quickly & without being told, what kind of answer is going to land well upstairs and what kind isn't. So they start to curate. Not dishonestly or maliciously. Simply just sensibly given what the environment is rewarding.

The meeting stops being a diagnostic exercise and turns into a performance. Everyone still talks. Numbers still get reported. The meeting still happens on schedule etc. But the information moving through it has been quietly edited in the sense that it’s now shaped to manage the pressure rather than to reflect reality.

I sat in one of those rooms not long ago.

The founder was sharp, prepared, genuinely trying to understand why the numbers weren't moving. The commercial lead gave a confident account of the pipeline and solid enough reasons for every slipped deal. There were reasonable timelines on everything live. All ok and nothing that didn't make sense on the surface.

Afterwards, one of the sales team caught me in the corridor. Took about thirty seconds to tell me what the meeting hadn't. Three deals that weren't coming back. One rep having hassle at home and who'd already mentally checked out. A customer conversation from the previous week that everyone in the room had decided, without discussing it, not to bring up.

During that meeting (or performance?) nobody lied. That's the part I remember most.

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When a sales team is optimising primarily to defend decisions upward, they stop optimising for the customer in front of them. The focus shifts from being genuinely useful in a sales conversation to being defensible in the next internal one. Efficiency gets prioritised over effectiveness because efficiency produces cleaner numbers and effectiveness is harder to explain when the pressure is on.

Salespeople, at their core, are problem solvers. Give them clear heads, clear direction, and genuine space to operate and they'll find a way. Chain them to a reporting structure that rewards curated information over honest assessment, and guess what happens to the quality of thinking in the room over time?

There's a question I sometimes put to founders who are deep in this pattern….it tends to land uncomfortably. Should you still be calling yourself Chief Executive Officer? Or have you actually become Chief Experience Officer without noticing? But not for the customers, for the investor(s). It becomes more and more obvious that they’re managing the experience of the numbers rather than the reality underneath them. Obvious to me but not them.

So should we be asking how to manage governance pressure more effectively? I don’t think so because that question accepts the problem as fixed and works around it.

Is this a better question? What would need to be true about the commercial function for the honest conversation to feel safe enough to have?

My rationale is this; when that conversation is happening i.e. when the pipeline review is actually diagnostic, when the sales team trusts that the real number leads somewhere useful rather than somewhere dangerous, then something specific changes. The investor conversation changes with it. Confidence built on genuine commercial clarity leads those conversations rather than surviving them.

There is a version of managing upward that doesn't feel like managing upward at all. It's what happens when the fundamentals are solid enough, and the people executing them are trusted enough to the point where the numbers speak without anyone needing to adjust them first.

The O-ring data was there the whole time.

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