Every organisation runs two systems at once. One is written down: governance frameworks, delegated authorities, reporting lines, the policies a board can point to when a regulator asks. The other is learned. It tells people who can challenge a senior leader without being labelled difficult, whose judgement is trusted before the evidence arrives, who gets forgiven for a mistake and who has to earn their credibility back from scratch. Amna Zaidi, who has spent over 25 years working with major financial institutions, leading complex regulatory transformation, advising Boards and senior leaders, and conducting independent investigations in high-stakes environments, argues that the second system usually decides the outcome. It is also the one almost nobody admits exists. That gap, between the stated culture and the experienced one, is where she locates the most consequential governance risk facing boards right now, and it is the argument running through her book, Unwinnable No More.
The Organisation Beneath The Organisation
The meritocratic story most capable professionals are handed is seductive because it is partly true. Work hard, deliver, build credibility, and the work will speak for itself. Zaidi believed it for years. Then she noticed something that complicated it. “Competence matters enormously. But competence does not operate in a vacuum. Visibility matters. Access matters. Relationships matter. Timing matters. Power matters.” Opportunities, she found, did not simply follow performance. Some people had access to the spaces where relationships formed and decisions took shape. Others arrived after the real conversation had already happened.
That is not a complaint about unfairness. It is a diagnostic claim, and it has operational consequences. If informal access determines who shapes decisions, then an organisation’s succession pipeline, its risk escalation, and its ability to hear bad news are all being governed by a system no committee has ever reviewed. Zaidi’s reframing is deliberately uncomfortable. The useful question is not who wins, but WHO GETS TO? “Who gets to speak? Who gets heard? Who gets believed? Who gets to challenge? Who gets another chance? Who gets to decide? Who gets to lead?” Boards that cannot answer those questions about their own rooms are managing a system they cannot see.
Somebody Else Defined The Problem
The most expensive mistake in high-stakes leadership, on Zaidi’s account, happens before anyone starts solving anything. “They accept somebody else’s definition of the problem.” A difficult colleague becomes a personality problem. A disagreement becomes something someone has to win. A struggling executive becomes a performance process. A cultural problem becomes an HR problem. A board problem becomes a governance review. Each of those translations may be correct. Each of them also forecloses every alternative that was never named.
Pressure makes this worse, because under pressure certainty sells. Leaders want the answer, the precedent, the process, anything that specifies the next step. Zaidi’s test is sharper: “What if the constraint you are working around is actually an assumption? What if the person you think is the problem is responding to something nobody has examined? What if the choice between A and B is preventing anyone from imagining C?” This is where her title earns its keep. Some ceilings are ceilings. Some are assumptions mistaken for ceilings. “The strongest leaders I have encountered are not simply better at solving difficult problems. They are better at noticing when the problem itself needs to be challenged.” The skill is knowing which is which, and the cost of guessing wrong is a flawlessly executed solution to the wrong problem.
Silence Is Data, But Not The Kind Boards Think
Investigations give Zaidi a view most directors never get: the archaeology of a decision after the fact. The email nobody answered. The concern that was softened. The conversation that happened privately and never reached the minutes. The person who knew something was wrong and did not feel able to say it. The challenge that was technically invited and socially discouraged. Taken individually, those moments look trivial. Assembled, they explain how a decision came to be. She describes sitting in a room while a decision was shaped about someone who was not there to defend themselves. “Nobody shouted. Nobody issued a threat. They did not need to. The power in the room was already understood.” Her conclusion has stayed with her since: “Power is often most powerful when it does not need to announce itself.”
This is what standard culture measurements keeps missing. A chair asks whether anyone disagrees and hears nothing. The silence might mean consensus. It might mean someone has watched what happens to people who challenge here. “And those two boards can look identical in the minutes.” Engagement scores, whistleblowing data, and psychological safety statements do not separate them. “You do not need a room full of people who agree,” Zaidi says. “You only need a room in which enough people have decided that disagreement is not worth the cost.” Her forecast for where scrutiny is heading follows directly. Demonstrating that a process was followed will not be enough. Leaders will be asked what they knew, what they questioned, whose perspective was missing, what they did with the information that made them uncomfortable, and what happened to the person who challenged the prevailing view. “A policy cannot have the difficult conversation for you. A governance framework cannot tell you whether silence in the room means consensus or fear.” Good governance, in her view, cannot only control decisions. It has to create the conditions in which better ones become possible, and leaders will increasingly be judged by what they made possible for others to say before the decision was made.
Follow Amna Zaidi on LinkedIn for more on WHO GETS TO?, the unwritten rules of power, and the decisions that shape leadership, opportunity and organisational outcomes.
