Being the Bad Guy Can Help You Save the Day

Trevor Noah recently made an argument on his podcast, What Now?, that had me raising my eyebrows.

He suggested the Avengers, yes, the Avengers, might be the bad guys. You’re probably rolling your eyes, but hear him out, because I almost didn't.

Trevor argues that the Avengers are good people who sincerely believe they're the good guys, but watch what they actually do, and you see they wait, react, and squabble among themselves, dodging every hard call until a crisis forces their hand. In the quiet stretches between battles, when they have the power and the time to make things better, they don't do much of anything.

He goes on to say that when they finally win, the victory they celebrate is putting everything back the way it was.

Thanos, meanwhile, had a plan. A monstrous one, to be clear, and nobody's nominating him for Employee of the Month. But he had a view of the future and was willing to be hated to get there. The heroes, for all their power, never had a plan beyond the next fight.

I caught myself nodding, saying, “Ok, Trevor, I see your point.”

Then I thought about almost every leadership meeting I've ever sat in and realized I've lived a version of this.

Years ago, my team rescued a project that was set up to fail. Leadership had chosen a direction and announced it without consulting the people who'd actually do the work. When the predictable crisis hit, we scrambled and delivered. We got praised for the save.

Nobody mentioned that the only reason we needed saving was the decision itself. Everyone knew the cart was put before the horse.

In way too many organizations, asking why the horse was behind the cart is a bad-guy move.

It usually means pointing at the people who made the call. So the save gets the applause, the cause goes unexamined, and a few months later someone gets applauded for the same rescue.

The leaders with real influence are willing to be the bad guy early, making the unpopular call with the right people in the room, so they rarely need to be the hero later.

You don't need Thanos's methods, just his willingness to be unpopular before the crisis instead of after it.

Now, if you've built a career on expertise, you might be thinking that being the person who can fix anything is the job. I get it. Crisis response is a real skill, and a lot of expert reputations are built on it. The trouble starts when it becomes the operating model.

When the same fire shows up every quarter, the expert putting it out has quietly become part of the fire's maintenance schedule.

This tension is much older than any of us.

In February 1735, a letter signed only "A.A." ran in Benjamin Franklin's Pennsylvania Gazette; the National Archives files it among Franklin's own writings. It was about protecting Philadelphia from fire, and its first piece of advice leaned on a phrase we still use: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

He meant literal fire, people carrying live coals from room to room with nothing covering them.

The letter also urged the city to form "a Club or Society of active Men" for its fire engines, and in December 1736 the Union Fire Company was born, capped at thirty members. A standing system instead of a hope that brave individuals would show up.

More than two and a half centuries later, MIT researchers Nelson Repenning and John Sterman studied why improvement efforts fail inside companies. They found that organizations stuck in firefighting mode reward the heroes, starve the prevention work, and slowly lose capability, a cycle they named the capability trap.

One engineer they interviewed handed them the title of their paper: "Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened."

So if your organization's culture won't hand out credit for prevention, someone has to be willing to do the unpopular work anyway.

Here are three moves, each targeting a habit that keeps teams stuck in crisis mode.

Let’s get it…

Decide when you'll end a struggling project before anyone is too attached to let it go.

This move fixes the habit of being too polite to make the hard call.

At your next planning meeting, ask your team to imagine it's a year from now and your biggest goal has failed.

Then ask: What did we hold onto that we should have let go? Before anyone gets more attached, agree on when you'll pull the plug.

For example: If this project hasn't hit its first milestone by March 31, we end it and move the two people on it to our top priority.

Imagining failure in advance works better than you'd think.

Psychologist Gary Klein, who made this exercise popular, points to research showing that picturing an outcome as if it already happened makes people about 30% better at spotting why it could happen.

Someone has to be the bad guy here. It's better if it's you, and better if it's now, while the decision is still cheap.

Give another team one tool or skill your team has been keeping to itself. That breaks the habit of hoarding what makes you valuable.

Pick one tool, method, or bit of know-how your team uses that another team could use today. This month, hand it over or teach them how to use it.

The ask can be this simple: We built a tracker that flags projects in trouble two weeks early. I think it could save your team a lot of last-minute scrambling. Can I walk you through it Thursday?

You stop being the team everyone calls in a crisis and become the team that makes crises less likely.

After every crisis, find the wrong assumption that caused it and change how you work so it can't happen again.

Getting back to normal is where most teams stop, and it's why the same fire keeps coming back.

After your next crisis or deadline scramble, stop asking How do we get back to business as usual?

Ask this instead: What did we assume that turned out to be wrong, and what do we need to change so we never need a hero for this again?

Say leadership announced a new direction before talking to the people who'd do the work.

Pushing for the strong review might make you the bad guy in one meeting; I’ve seen this happen in real time. But it also means every crisis leaves you better off instead of just back where you started.

Heroics feel like leadership because they're visible.

Prevention is invisible, which is exactly why it's rare and exactly why it's valuable.

The leader willing to be the bad guy early is usually the one who actually saves the day.

End the stalled project, share what only your team has, and fix what the fire taught you.

Put the horse in front from the start, and nobody has to suit up.

Thanks for reading. Be easy!