Max Bazerman and Michael Watkins studied a category of organisational failure they called predictable surprises — events that came as a shock to the leadership team but that, in retrospect, were clearly anticipated by the evidence available before they occurred. The Enron collapse. The NASA Challenger disaster. The 2008 financial crisis. In each case, the information that would have allowed the outcome to be avoided was present in the organisation before the event. In each case, the leadership team’s model of the situation excluded or discounted that information. The failure was not in the organisation’s intelligence-gathering. It was in the executive cognition that processed what was gathered.