Three years of clean results should have been the best news of my career. It was actually a warning sign, and I almost missed it.
For three years, an audit I was accountable for produced zero failures. On paper, that should have been the best run of my career. Instead, it started to bother me — not because I suspected fraud or laziness, but because I could not point to anything specific that had actually gotten better in those three years to explain why the results had gotten so uniformly clean. That absence of an explanation was the warning sign. I nearly missed it, because unbroken success does not announce itself as a problem. It just feels like winning.
The claim
Most leadership writing sells a transformation story — a before and after, a moment that changed everything, a turning point the reader can borrow. I want to make a less comfortable argument: steady, uninterrupted competence is its own risk. Not because success is bad, but because it erodes a specific instinct — the instinct to keep checking whether you are actually still good, or just currently unchallenged. Those are not the same thing, and the longer the clean run continues, the harder they are to tell apart.
The psychology of an unbroken run
A leader who has had a public failure recently still has the muscle memory of what failure feels like, and that memory keeps the checking instinct alive. A leader who has not had one in years is structurally at higher risk of missing the next real one — not because they have become careless, but because the absence of correction has quietly removed the signal that correction might be needed. Nobody tells you the checking instinct has gone dormant. You only find out when something breaks that a working instinct would have caught earlier.
This is uncomfortable to admit about your own record, which is exactly why it goes unaddressed. Admitting that your recent success might be partly a measurement problem rather than entirely a performance triumph is not a natural thing for any leader to want to say out loud, including me.
The instinct that caught it
What actually made me look harder at those three clean years was not a specific red flag. It was the flatness of the pattern itself — the fact that I could not name what, specifically, had improved to produce three years of identical clean results. Real improvement usually looks uneven: better in some places, flat in others, with visible cause and effect you can point to. Uniform, unbroken cleanliness with no discernible cause is a different signature, and once I noticed I could not explain it, I stopped trusting it.
I made the case internally that the audit itself needed to be run differently — in a form the organization had not adjusted to — specifically because I distrusted a result I could not explain, not because I had evidence anything was wrong. That distinction matters. I was not chasing a specific suspicion. I was refusing to accept a clean result as proof of health just because it was clean. The next cycle, run differently, surfaced problems the unbroken run had been quietly hiding.
How to build the instinct
The practice that keeps this instinct alive is specific and schedulable: treat an unbroken streak as a prompt to look harder, not a reason to relax. Concretely — the moment any result of consequence has come back clean for longer than you can explain by name a specific cause, put a note on the calendar to re-examine that result in a form it has not seen before. Not because you suspect a problem. Because the absence of a nameable cause for a clean run is itself the data point worth investigating.
This is a private practice, not an organizational process. The organizational version — reinstating a retired audit — is a different conversation with different mechanics. What I am describing here is the personal habit of distrusting your own clean record specifically when you cannot explain why it is clean, and going looking for the problem before someone else finds it for you.
The standard you enforce on yourself
Distrust of an unexplained clean run is itself a standard, and like any standard, it has to be enforced consistently or it will not survive contact with the natural pleasure of a good result. It is far easier to accept credit for three clean years than to interrogate why they were clean. The leaders who keep their organizations honest longest are the ones who apply that interrogation to their own record first, before applying it to anyone else’s. What you tolerate, you teach. What you enforce, you build — and the hardest standard to enforce is the one aimed at your own success.
Scott Pleus is an operating executive who has built his career on a single conviction: an organization’s confidence in its own readiness is only as good as the last time someone actually tested it. If nobody told you your numbers were good, would you still believe them? That conviction was forged over three decades of command in the United States Air Force, retiring as a Lieutenant General and the longest-serving Acting Vice Chief of Staff in the role’s 79-year history. His command experience is the civilian equivalent of running large, high-consequence operations at every level of scale — from a single division, to a joint international operation, to the number-two position in a 680,000-person global organization. In every one of those roles, the product was readiness, and there was no such thing as a plausible excuse for being wrong about it. His standard, in his own words: accountable, not responsible. That is the experience most executive backgrounds don’t have, and it is what any organization needs when it wants to know — not hope — that it can perform under pressure. Early in his career, he noticed something worth learning from: a self-assessment that had never once produced a failure. Rather than take that as good news, he treated it as a signal that the test itself needed to evolve. He built a new version of the check — one that measured real readiness instead of rehearsed readiness — and kept refining it, even when the organization pushed back, because he was committed to the standard underneath it, not just the version of it that was easiest to pass. That same instinct shaped how he led. He made a habit of showing up unannounced, not to catch anyone, but to see the organization as it actually ran day to day — and to ask the one question a prepared briefing never answers. That habit paid off when he inherited a struggling unit: he gave its two senior leaders a clear deadline and clear ownership of the turnaround, and in sixty days, the unit had rebuilt the standard for itself. The stakes in his operating environment left no room for a wrong answer — there was no version of a readiness failure that was merely inconvenient. That is precisely why the discipline transfers: an executive who has enforced a verification standard with zero margin for error brings a rigor to operating risk that most executive backgrounds never have to develop. Trust what’s tested. Not what’s told.
