The Illusion of Control

Most senior leaders assume they’re in control of their most important business-critical programs. The reporting cadence is tight. Issues are escalated. Milestones tracked. War rooms convened. You can walk the floor and feel the effort.

But the results tell a different story. Critical deliverables slide. Costs spiral. Timelines shift – again. Confidence thins out.

So, What’s Going Wrong?

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: most organisations aren’t managing the real problems. They’re just managing the knock-on effects.

Leaders respond exactly as they’ve been conditioned to – moving fast, chasing red flags, keeping things moving.

They’ve been taught that decisiveness and visibility equals control.

The Progress Chaser Problem

They swarm to the issue of the day. Something slips? Allocate more resources. Another delay? Rewrite the timeline.

Another blocker? Convene a task force.

To an outsider, it all looks like progress. But inside, it’s reactive. Exhausting. Circular.

Years ago, I saw this play out on a factory floor while working on a manufacturing control system. The biggest disruptors weren’t planners or engineers. They were the so-called Progress Chasers.

If a part was missing from one telephone exchange, they’d grab the same part from another. They looked like heroes – fast, hands-on, always “getting things moving.”

But they never solved the actual problem. They just moved it around.

Sure enough, that same part showed up missing on another exchange hours later. The cycle repeated. Nothing was fixed. The symptoms just migrated.

Modern Programs, Same Old Cycle

That same mindset haunts large programs today.

Leaders respond to symptoms because that’s what they see. And they see symptoms because the system isn’t tuned to isolate causes.

No one’s asking:

· Why did this problem happen in the first place?

· Who really owns this decision?

· What’s missing that we should have seen by now?

And that’s the real danger. It’s not what’s going wrong – it’s what no one has noticed is missing.

The dependency that was assumed. The decision that was never nailed down. The risk that everyone quietly agreed not to mention.

The War Room Illusion

This is why war rooms are seen as magic bullets – a false comfort blanket.

They create the illusion of control. But really, they’re a last-ditch attempt to compensate for what wasn’t done earlier: the hard thinking, the joined-up planning, the ownership.

What Real Program Leaders Do

You don’t need more hustle. You need more foresight from people who know what failure looks like before it lands.

Because the best program leaders aren’t the ones who react fastest. They’re the ones who notice the silence. Who ask the awkward questions. Who make the invisible visible.

If You Want Real Control

· Stop rewarding firefighting

· Start recognising obvious patterns

· Teach failure through lived experience – not just templates

· And bring in independent judgment early enough to matter

Because chasing symptoms will never fix your program.

It just moves the problem further down the track – until it becomes someone else’s crisis.

An Independent Program Review (IPR) from Mentor highlights precisely what needs to be in place for program success.

We ask those awkward questions and spot the missing pieces that would otherwise go unchecked. No more kicking the can down the road.

So, if you would like a conversation with people who’ve walked this path many times before, please call me on 07860 222282 or email me at david.hilliard@mentoreurope.com

About the author

David Hilliard is founder of Mentor, specialists in strategic program execution.

You can call him on 0118 359 2444 or email david.hilliard@mentoreurope.com.