Everything’s Green. Until It’s Red.

“I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.”

I mean, who doesn’t love this W. Somerset Maugham quote?

It just gets at something so wise and essential. It captures what most people get wrong about inspiration. We think it’s mystical. But really, it’s methodical.

Now I don’t write novels. My craft is organizational success. And in my realm, accountability is the much-misunderstood thing.

We swap it in for blame. But really? It means prep. In its truest form, it’s fortification against failure — not a consequence for it.

We invoke accountability after things fall apart. But the real deal of it happens well before.

Something goes wrong. A product launch misses. A deadline slips. A client escalation lands on the wrong desk. And a senior leader, frustrated, under pressure, asks the question:

“Who is accountable for this?”

But asked in this way, it’s the wrong question. The moment for real accountability has passed.

When a writer wants inspiration, they must build the conditions for it. They show up. They do the work. And the inspiration follows.

When a leader wants accountability, same. It’s built — not manifested. They must provide clarity — real clarity — on goals, roles, and priorities. Must create space for meaningful planning. Not the performative kind where everyone says all the enthusiastic yeses out loud. While their minds are panicking from the clear impossibility of delivery. The kind where a team honestly asks: what’s going to get hard, and how will we handle it when it does?

And most essentially, they infuse the psychological safety that lets their team actually live in the yellow.

A client said something to me recently that I haven’t stopped thinking about…

“Everything is green until it’s red.”

We never hit yellow. We never acknowledge something heading off track. We pretend things are fine until it’s too late to pretend at all.

This is what happens when accountability only shows up as punishment. People learn fast. Raising a concern feels like volunteering for blame. Flagging a risk feels like owning a failure. So the safest move is silence.

Green lights across the board. Right up until everything is on fire.

Yellow is the most valuable signal a team can produce. But you only get it if people believe that surfacing a problem is an act of ownership — not an admission of fault.

This is the part leaders have the most control over. And it’s not complicated. It’s the difference between two kinds of questions.

One kind sounds like: Who dropped this? Why wasn’t this caught? Whose responsibility was this?

The other sounds like: What are we learning? Where are we stuck? How can we all pitch in and help?

The first set assigns shame. The second builds a team that actually tells you the truth. And a team that tells you the truth is a team that catches problems in the yellow — before they ever turn red.

To leaders who keep finding themselves asking “who’s accountable” after things go wrong:

What if the question itself is the evidence?

Evidence that accountability was never built. That clarity wasn’t provided. That planning was performative. That safety was absent. That the team launched into the work without the foundation to navigate difficulty together.

The instinct when something breaks is to find the failure point and fix it. That feels like rigor. But it’s the equivalent of waiting for inspiration to strike and then asking why it didn’t show up sooner.

The failure you’re seeing isn’t a team problem. It’s a setup problem. And the accountability you’re looking for after the fact is the very thing that was missing before it.

Maugham showed up at nine every morning. Not because inspiration was guaranteed. But because he’d built the conditions for it to arrive.

Accountability works the same way. Stop waiting for things to go wrong to invoke it. Start building it before they do.