A cure for chronic unease

I’ve never liked the sound of ‘chronic unease’, even though it’s touted as one of the most important things executive leaders can embrace to stay vigilant, to keep the discussion about risk alive, to be preoccupied with failure. But ‘chronic’ is a medical word for a condition that doesn't resolve, such as: chronic pain, chronic illness, chronic fatigue. And ‘unease’ is anxiety without a specific object. Put them together and you're describing a leader who is permanently, vaguely anxious. That's not a desirable state. It's not even a functional one. 

The irony is that the concept is pointing at something genuinely important: a refusal to be captured by your own good story. The capacity to stay curious about the gap between how the organisation understands itself and how it actually works.  It's about treating good news as a question rather than an answer. It's about remaining open to being surprised.

None of that is unease. It's closer to organisational curiosity, grounded in intellectual honesty. The organisations that do this well are populated by leaders who have learned to treat comfort as a signal to look harder, and who have specific practices for doing that looking. 

I have 3 questions that they can come back to time and time again, that I encourage organisations to reflect on, try variations on, and keep making sense of together. They are:

• Where is work fragile right now?

• Where is the next incident going to be?

• Why aren’t we having more accidents?

Where is work fragile right now?

This is the opener because it's accessible without being soft. "Fragile" asks for a felt sense of where the system is close to its edge. Not a failure, deviation, or even a problem. It could point towards a team or part of the business that's understaffed but coping. A process that depends on one person who knows how it actually works. A piece of equipment that's been nursed back into service one too many times. 

The question invites specificity without demanding it. And because "fragile" isn't a category in any reporting system, the answer has to come from the person's own knowledge, observation and assessment rather than a dashboard. Fragility isn't the same as danger. Something can be fragile and currently fine, which is precisely what makes it worth asking about.

Where and when will the next incident occur?

This is the most provocative question in the set, as it assumes an incident is coming. That assumption sits in direct tension with how most safety cultures and organisational identities present themselves: we're working toward zero, we’re a safe organisation, or we believe all accidents are preventable. Asking when the next one will happen cuts through that.

The power is that it requires probabilistic thinking about the organisation's own operation. People who answer it sincerely tend to point to specific places, developing situations, resource strains, specific intersections or shear points between pressure, mess and capability. 

Why aren't we having more accidents?

Most safety conversations ask about what’s wrong, or what might go wrong. This one asks about what's going right, but in a way that forces the person to actually explain it rather than point to a system or a campaign. It assumes that the gap between current conditions and more frequent failure is being actively maintained by something, and asks what that something is.

Often the honest answer involves people. The experienced operator who reads a machine the way a doctor reads a patient. The shift supervisor who knows when a team is near its limit before anyone has said anything. That capability is real, valuable, and largely invisible to the organisation. But sometimes the honest answer is harder. If a leader can't explain why they're not having more accidents, if they point to dashboards and campaigns but can't describe the actual mechanisms keeping people safe, then the implicit answer is uncomfortable: maybe the current rate of harm is lower than the underlying conditions warrant, and the gap is being maintained by luck rather than design. And as such, it’s an invitation to look more carefully at what's actually holding things together, before circumstances change and that question answers itself.

In practice

Last week I was in the US working with an executive team on exactly this. They run critical infrastructure for some of the world's largest companies. When I put these three questions to the room, the room went quiet as everyone started making notes about their own answers. After 3 minutes of individual reflection, the group started sharing. An honest, raw, and partly uncomfortable confrontation with their own reality followed.

These questions are obviously not just for executive teams but can be asked in one-on-one conversations, team catch-ups, workshops, or even company wide surveys (I'd love to see that one happening). 

Chronic unease doesn’t need curing. The concept points toward something real and important. The goal isn’t to manufacture anxiety in leaders, but to create organisational conditions where weak signals, fragilities, and uncomfortable truths remain discussable. For that, they need better language, better questions, and practices that keep them in contact with how work is actually happening.

Daniel