Kendra MacDonald is the CEO of Canada’s Ocean Supercluster.
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When I was seventeen, I spent a month in France on a school trip. At the end, my mother flew over so we could celebrate my birthday together. When the trip ended, I tried calling her hotel so we could connect. No answer. Eventually, I walked over. She was there but had not answered the phone.
Two friends from the trip were supposed to join my birthday dinner later that week. They never called, and I assumed they had forgotten or decided not to come.
The explanation was remarkably simple: When my mother arrived a few days earlier, she had accidentally knocked the hotel phone off the hook. My friends had called multiple times, but the calls never connected. I assumed it was personal. It wasn’t. It was a system problem.
More than thirty years later, I still catch myself making the same mistake. As leaders, we can be quick to explain away outcomes like a missed deadline, a stalled project or a frustrated customer. We instinctively create a story: They didn’t care, they weren’t trying or they should have known better.
Sometimes those stories are true. But our first explanation is rarely our best one. That birthday taught me something I have spent three decades relearning: Vision sets the direction. Systems determine whether you get there.
Be suspicious of your first explanation.
As the France example demonstrates, our brains dislike uncertainty. When information is missing, we naturally fill in the gaps with assumptions. The challenge is that those assumptions often say more about our perspective than they do about reality.
When something doesn’t go as planned, try to replace certainty with curiosity: “What information am I missing? What assumptions have I made? Could there be another explanation?” Only after asking those questions can we separate a systems problem from an issue with accountability.
Use vision to inspire people and systems to help them succeed.
In my current role, I spend a great deal of time thinking about the future of Canada’s ocean economy. As our organization grew, one colleague made an observation that has stayed with me: They said I spent so much time thinking about the vision that I sometimes forgot people also needed to know how to turn their computers on.
Years earlier, while leading a team in Hong Kong, I learned a similar lesson. I spent a great deal of time describing the outcome I wanted, believing I was giving people flexibility. Instead, I was often creating uncertainty. That team taught me that what felt like empowerment to me could feel like ambiguity to others. They weren’t lacking capability; I had not given them the right tools to succeed.
Vision matters. But people can’t deliver on it without clear expectations, practical training, good tools and the confidence to ask questions.
Standardize the outcome, but personalize the learning.
As organizations grow, consistency becomes increasingly important. Processes help reduce risk. Standards help improve quality. Shared expectations allow people to work together effectively.
In the past, many organizations faced a trade-off: They could standardize because it was efficient or personalize because people learn differently. AI is beginning to change that trade-off by giving leaders tools to maintain consistent standards while personalizing how people develop the skills to meet them: through written instructions, short videos, simulations, coaching and tools that answer questions in real time.
However, as AI automates work that once helped early-career professionals learn by doing, we as leaders need to create new ways to build judgment, confidence and capability.
Design systems for humans.
Whether you’re building a company, strengthening an industry or growing an economy, sustained success rarely depends on extraordinary individuals alone. In my experience, it depends more on the systems you intentionally design around them.
Most employees, customers and partners work effectively within well-designed systems. It is usually the exceptions that expose the assumptions we didn’t realize we were making. That is a useful lesson from design thinking: understanding people at the edges—the first-time employee, the customer with different needs, the person with less experience or someone interpreting instructions differently—can reveal weaknesses everyone else has learned to work around.
But there is a trap here. If we try to account for every possible circumstance, the system becomes increasingly complicated: another policy, another approval, another exception, another page of instructions. When systems become too complicated, people don’t become more compliant. They become more dependent on shortcuts, assumptions and workarounds. Ironically, the controls we introduce to reduce risk can sometimes create new risks of their own.
The answer isn’t more policies. It is better systems design. Instead of asking people to remember more, make sure your systems are making it easier for your people to make the right decisions.
I see the same principle in innovation. We often celebrate remarkable entrepreneurs, breakthrough technologies and high-performing organizations. Those successes matter, but I’ve found that lasting economic growth comes from systems that help ideas move from research to commercialization, attract investment, reach customers and scale. Individual success is inspiring, but systems make success repeatable.
Design systems that make better decisions easier.
Leadership isn’t just about making better decisions. It’s about designing systems that make better decisions easier. When something goes wrong, before you focus on the person, ask four questions:
1. “What assumption did I make?”
2. “What information was missing?”
3. “What part of the system wasn’t working as intended?”
4. “What could we redesign so the next person succeeds?”
Sometimes, the answer is accountability. Sometimes, an individual simply made the wrong decision. But more often than we might initially assume, there is something in the environment around that person that deserves our attention, too.
The bottom line: Leadership is measured not only by the decisions we make today, but by the systems we leave behind for the people who follow.
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