You are coaching a team, several teams or maybe even an organization. But things are not going well. They are going straight into the wall and not listening to your wise advice. Whatever effort you make to show them the coming disaster, they don’t even stop to think.
Assess whether the seriousness of the disaster ahead of you: can they (as a company, organization and team) recover from it?
And choose your strategy: avoid the wall at any cost or hit it.
Obviously if this is the kind of disaster that is going to get the company bankrupt or everyone fired, your job is to fight to the last minute to prevent it. So think about the ways you have tried to show the urgency until now and try to find out new ones. Maybe you have been too gentle until now. Or didn’t communicate enough about it.
But if you assess that hitting that wall will be painful but won’t kill them, then maybe you should go for it. Indeed, the lessons that we best learn are the one that we take from our own mistakes.
So let them pursue their path and hit that wall.
Your role then is to help keeping the disaster in «acceptable» bounds. Remain on your guard and watch out for signs that things are getting worse and too dangerous. Keep showing them the signs that things won’t work out how they expect but accept the fact that they do not want to see it.
And prepare for the recovery time! You have to know how you are going to handle it, what lessons you want them to learn. There will be pain and they will need you to go through it and use it to grow rather than to depress or fight between each other.
Exemple
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