Most AI strategies fail in the same place. Not in the design phase, not in the technology selection, and not in the rollout plan. They fail the moment a leader stands in front of their team and realizes — sometimes immediately, sometimes months later — that the people nodding in the room have already decided not to follow.
That is the belief gap. And until you close it, no strategy survives contact with your organization.
John Chen understood this the hard way. When he walked into BlackBerry as CEO in November 2013, the company had gone from controlling roughly half the U.S. smartphone market to low single digits in just a few years. He moved quickly on the obvious stuff: write-downs, workforce cuts, a Foxconn manufacturing partnership, and a decision to focus on enterprise customers rather than chase the mass market. Nobody accused him of moving slowly.
But the problem that consumed him had nothing to do with product or technology. People had stopped believing it was safe to tell the truth. Staff were burying bad news for fear of getting blamed. They weren’t challenging decisions. He understood that when people stop speaking honestly, every strategy built on top of that becomes a house of cards. In a 2025 Deep Purpose podcast interview with Ranjay Gulati, Chen explained: “Your people could handle a lot of things if they believe that you treat them fairly.”
