Verena Wahl
For nearly twenty years I worked inside organizations as they grew — in senior marketing and brand leadership, in the boardrooms where strategy gets set and the corridors where it comes undone. What held my attention was rarely the thing on the agenda. It was the distance between two things: what a company said about itself, and what its people had already sensed was true.
Most of what looks like a leadership problem is a symptom. The real pattern sits underneath, and it usually has no name, which is part of why it persists. People feel it long before anyone can point to it. A team agrees to everything and delivers nothing. A reorg fixes the wrong thing. A capable person goes quiet in a way no one quite registers until they've already gone. Everyone in the story is competent. Something is still off.
Misattunement is the gap between what’s said and what’s sensed
— the reason effort and honesty can both be fully present inside an organization and the work still doesn't land.
I keep returning to it because I'm drawn to the moments most organizations move past too quickly: the pause before someone decides not to say the thing, the agreement that arrives too easily, the quarter where everyone did their job and something still went wrong. That's where the real signal is, and it's usually the part no one writes down.
So this is what I write about here: observations from practice about how organizations actually behave as they scale, and how leadership, culture and the human systems beneath the org chart shape what a company can and can't do. My grounding is practical before it's theoretical: two decades of leading teams through growth, from fast-scaling tech like Just Eat Takeaway to enterprises like Kia and Lidl. Most of what's here comes from having been in the room.
I call this misattunement because it's what happens when organizations lose their sense for what's actually happening.
In parallel, I'm also building Bright Creatures, an advisory and organizational development practice built around this work. This isn't its website. It's simply where I think out loud.