In my years of working with leadership teams in science-based organisations, one scene repeats. The team is meeting to agree a recommendation it must issue, and the evidence itself is not in dispute. Someone talks about confidence intervals. Someone else talks about acceptable risk. The director weighs what the institution...

Most of my work with teams over the past year has begun with some version of the same conversation. Budgets are shrinking and mandates are contested. Institutions that took decades to build are being asked to justify their existence inside a news cycle. The people in the room did not...