Avoidance - the quiet killer
And how to avoid it
In real life, high blood pressure the quiet killer. You can perfectly die from it, without ever realizing you have that condition. If lucky, you get your blood pressure taken one day, fall from the chair, realizing you were doing sports with a base level blood pressure of 180:120. I’m not joking. After that you might observe some symptoms, as you are now more aware and cautious. You might also just die, heart failure, heart attack, just a plain normal death. Just a little young. You don’t feel high blood pressure but it can kill you.
In business, avoidance is the silent, pleasant killer.
Avoidance defined
Avoidance is: Avoiding the hard discussions, the friction necessary to create clarity, for the sake of social peace. Avoiding conflict by playing it “nice.” Avoiding the awkward moment of breaking with what feels like chill and peace, when a decision should be made.
Being part of many leadership groups I know this awkward feeling too well myself: leaving a meeting all smiling, drowning pseudo-agreements, and a vague sense of alignment. While each one goes back to their department, telling their story of decisions that were made, keeping up their own narrative. Now we have 5 truths and 5 narratives. Let’s have fun by extrapolation the non-agreements to our whole work force. A week or a month later, disaster strikes and reality brutally shows: we were not aligned, we avoided the clarity, because it felt better, the vibes felt more chill.
Avoidance felt peaceful in the moment. But the corporate equivalent of not opening your bills doesn’t make the problem go away. It just boomerangs back at you harder, later.
Avoiding avoidance with cadence
Of course here I need to refer back to the only silver bullet in my life: cadences (read about them more deeply in “Cadence or Die”). Cadences are the best medicine against avoidance. The harder avoidance, the faster the cadence, the more frequent the meetings.
And remember: Cadence meetings are not vibe meetings. They are not status meetings. Not therapy sessions for leadership anxiety. Cadence meetings are decision meetings. Repeat after me: cadence meetings are decision meetings.
They exist for one purpose only: to create clarity. Nothing more, nothing less. Clarity for everyone in the organization.
Everything else - exchange, monitoring, status updates - can exist as a part of the meetings but for the sole purpose of supporting the only outcome that counts: decisions creating clarity.
Keep your sensor systems up, and when the unclarity triggers are perking: clarity must be rebuilt. But motivational speeches really don’t help at all. Discipline does: structure and rhythm. The harder the problem, the more frequent the meetings. The deeper the avoidance the more radical the solution.
Why not have daily C-Level meetings if the issue has deep roots?
It doesn’t feel nice, but remember: no one’s to blame, the high cadence is not punishment but a solution.
Decisions, not tasks
One of the most common misunderstandings is that cadence meetings are about tasks. In these meetings, often people are waiting to get organized. Nope!
These meetings are not about tasks. Tasks are a downstream problem to be solved (maybe by the same people, elsewhere): projects and programs, which are reactions to decisions.
In cadence, we deal with: decisions → expected outcomes → responsibilities.
Once a decision is made, execution begins elsewhere (but stays connected like communicating vessels). We will watch outcome and stay informed but execution is not the issue we manage here.
That’s how clarity travels through the system without being diluted.
Avoiding avoidance
Some things I think about when trying to counter avoidance
1. Short cycles force contact with reality.
Avoidance is amplified by long gaps - where stories rewrite themselves.
High frequency kills that drift. Every well conducted meeting (remember: decisions, not vibes) hits the participants on the head like a hammer. It’s not pleasant, not supposed to be. It just works.
The harder the avoidance pattern, the shorter the required frequency. It needs to feel, at least slightly, annoying. Otherwise, we’re back to avoidance and giving it excuses.
2. Decisions as the only output.
Every cadence ends with decisions made, deferred (explicitly), or killed.
Anything else - “good talk,” “great discussion” - is just noise (ironically to be avoided).
Closing with decisions is the habit we create.
3. Repetition exposes inconsistency.
Saying the same things out loud every week reveals drift. Repetition often feels stupid, especially to the one repeating. Until there is a decision and the narrative holds, we repeat and reframe until we have clarity.
4. Documented memory prevents the narrative and goal posts from moving.
A written recap is the backbone of alignment and the required one shared truth. (No misunderstanding: disagreement is welcome, friction is needed but with the goal of decision and clarity.)
No write up → multiple truths → everyone tells their own version at home.
Documentation isn’t bureaucracy and can be lean - but it’s required and countering myth.
5. Predictable confrontation reduces fear.
When these meetings are the place and time for friction, bringing the heat is not exposure anymore. It’s a weekly practice that is expected as part of your work.
Cadence normalizes required healthy conflict as a routine for hygiene.
Thus the opposite of avoidance is not aggression but rhythm.
6. Cadence replaces “niceness” with clarity.
“Being nice” protects fake relationships by protecting the illusions of alignment - because it feels good, although the receipts are waiting.
“Being clear” protects real relationships by protecting truth.
Cadence operationalizes that difference.
7. Cadence as mirror of intent.
If a leadership team can’t keep up the decision rhythm, it’s not simply an alignment issue. It’s a leadership issue of dealing with reality.
Avoidance hides intent. Cadence brings it back, and puts it to the test every week or whatever your cadence is.
Avoidance wins when cadence disappears
Avoidance is not a moral failure of leadership, especially not of the individual, it’s a systemic failure of not setting up the right structure.
With a lack of a designed rhythm that forces decision and feedback, avoidance naturally fills the void.
Entropy always rises without energy being fed into the system regularly. Thus intent decays not because people are stupid or ill intended or simply change their mind, but because they stop meeting with enough rhythm to maintain the shared intent and keep it clean.
Done right (and I’m not saying it’s simple) cadences are more than a management technique. You can make them your company’s heartbeat.
It’s hard to do, it can’t be outsourced and it can’t be faked.
The slide back effect when avoidance takes over, makes companies feel aligned rather than being aligned.
Which is when you start losing your strategy until only reaction is left.