The Leadership Warning Nobody Wants to Hear
Updated: Oct 5
Ana Postigo is an airline pilot, former CRM instructor, writer, and speaker working at the intersection of Human Factors, neuroscience, and human performance. Drawing on extensive experience in airline operations, she explores how cognition, behaviour, and the systems around us shape decision-making, performance, and safety in complex environments.
Most organisations do not fail loudly. They fail quietly, confidently, on a heading nobody thought to question. Kodak invented the digital camera in 1975. They shelved it. Film was profitable, and the future felt distant. By 2012, they had filed for bankruptcy.
Nokia held 40% of the global mobile phone market in 2007. When the iPhone arrived, they dismissed it as a niche product. Within five years, their market share had collapsed.
BlackBerry was the device of choice for presidents, CEOs, and governments worldwide. They believed their keyboard was irreplaceable. The touchscreen proved them wrong.
Blockbuster had the opportunity to buy Netflix in 2000 for fifty million dollars. They passed. A decade later, Netflix was worth billions, and Blockbuster was gone.
None of them failed because they lacked talent, resources, or intelligence. They failed because of something aviation identified decades ago and named with devastating precision.
Controlled flight into terrain. A perfectly functioning operation. A fully qualified team. Flying straight into terrain nobody saw coming. The name may be unfamiliar. The experience is not.
What is controlled flight into terrain?
In aviation, CFIT occurs when an aircraft with no mechanical failure, flown by a capable and qualified crew, flies into terrain because the crew has lost awareness of their position.
Nothing broke. Nobody panicked. The aircraft was working perfectly. Yet they flew straight into the ground.
No single catastrophic decision. No dramatic warning moment. Just a series of small, individually reasonable steps that together produced an outcome nobody intended.
The crew lost awareness of the gap between where they believed they were and where they actually were. CFIT does not happen because of bad pilots. It happens because of very human brains without the right systems to catch the gap. Sound familiar?
The first blind spot: Past success becomes present blindness
The brain is not designed to think fresh every time. It is designed to recognise patterns from the past and predict outcomes based on previous experience. This is one of the most powerful things the human brain does, and in high-pressure environments, it is also one of the most dangerous.
When a strategy has worked before, the brain encodes it as reliable. Reliable becomes default. Default becomes invisible. The organisation stops questioning the heading because the heading has always worked. Until it does not.
Neuroscience calls this confirmation bias. The brain actively seeks information that confirms what it already believes and filters out anything that challenges it. Under pressure, this filter becomes stronger, not weaker. Exactly when you most need accurate information, your brain is most aggressively selecting for comfortable information.
Kodak did not ignore the digital camera because they were reckless. They ignored it because decades of success had made film feel permanent.
The second blind spot: confidence is mistaken for competence
When a leader becomes highly confident, they begin to assume outcomes. They stop scanning for threats. The questions become fewer. The certainty becomes louder. The gap between what they believe is happening and what is actually happening quietly widens.
Research consistently shows that 95% of people believe they are self-aware. The actual figure is closer to 13%. The most confident leader in the room is often the least accurate about where the organisation actually is.
This is not a character flaw. It is neuroscience. The prefrontal cortex, responsible for honest self-assessment, is the first area of the brain to be compromised under stress and high workload. The more demanding the environment, the less accurate your internal picture of reality becomes. Certainty increases as clarity decreases.
The third blind spot: The authority gradient
In organisations where the leader's voice dominates, people adapt. They align with what the leader says, not because they agree, but because they do not see themselves as valued enough to challenge it.
When people do not feel valued, they stop being creative. They stop solving problems. They stop seeing solutions the leader cannot see. The most junior person in the room, who may have the clearest view of the terrain, stays silent.
In aviation, we identified this pattern in accident after accident. The most senior person in the cockpit was wrong. Nobody said so. Not because the others did not know. Because the culture made speaking up feel more dangerous than staying quiet.
This is not unique to aviation. It exists in every boardroom, hospital, financial institution and technology company where challenging upward is career limiting. The terrain approaches in silence.
What is actually happening in the brain
This is not a leadership failure. It is a brain failure. The brain builds its understanding of the world from patterns, experience and belief. In NLP, we call this the map is not the territory. Every leader navigates from an internal map, built from past success, personal bias and years of experience. When that map no longer matches the reality outside, the brain does not flag the discrepancy.
It defends the map. Certainty increases as clarity decreases. The internal narrative strengthens exactly as the external signals weaken. The organisation keeps flying, confident in its heading, straight toward terrain nobody sees coming.
What to do about it: Building your GPWS
In aviation, our answer to CFIT was not to find better pilots. It was to build better systems. The Ground Proximity Warning System, GPWS, scans the terrain and the position of the aircraft relative to the ground. When the aircraft gets too close to terrain, it issues a mandatory command the pilot cannot avoid and has only seconds to react.
Pull up. Terrain ahead. There is no discussion. No committee. No deference to seniority. Just a clear, independent signal that tells you exactly where you are and what you must do.
Every organisation that has avoided its own version of CFIT has built an equivalent. Here is what that looks like in practice.
Appoint a designated challenger in every major strategic decision, someone whose explicit role is to argue against the prevailing view. Not to obstruct. To pressure test.
Create genuinely anonymous upward feedback channels. Not surveys that are traceable. Real anonymity. The signal that tells you what people actually think rather than what they believe you want to hear.
Review your last three major decisions specifically for confirmation bias. Ask, what information did we discount? Who raised concerns that were not followed? What would we have needed to see to change course?
Bring in an external perspective regularly. Not to validate the existing strategy. To read the instruments independently. An outside eye has no investment in the current heading.
Build psychological safety as an operational priority, not a culture initiative. The most junior person in your organisation may be the one who can see the terrain. Whether they feel safe saying so is a leadership decision, not a personality trait.
The question worth asking
Most leadership teams believe they are self-aware, customer-focused, strategically clear and culturally healthy. The organisations that ran into terrain believed exactly the same things. Without exception. Because the brains involved are human.
The question is not whether your organisation could experience CFIT. The question is whether you have built the equivalent of GPWS.
The independent signal. The honest voice. The system that tells you where you actually are, regardless of where you believe yourself to be. Because in aviation, the terrain does not move. In business, it does not wait.
Read more from Ana Postigo
Ana Postigo, Airline Pilot, Human Factors Writer & Speaker
Ana Postigo is an airline pilot, former CRM instructor, writer, and speaker working at the intersection of Human Factors, neuroscience, and human performance. Drawing on extensive experience in airline operations, she explores the factors that shape how people think, decide, communicate, and perform in complex and high-pressure environments. Her work brings together operational experience with research from neuroscience, psychology, and Human Factors to explore decision-making, cognitive performance, resilience, error, and safety. As a speaker, she has contributed to events and conversations with organisations including BAC and Instituto Cervantes, translating complex ideas about human performance into accessible and practical discussions. Alongside her aviation and Human Factors work, Ana is also a children’s author, encouraging young readers to remain curious, pursue their ambitions, and believe in what they can become.
