The Fog in the Room: How Consultants Can Spot and Correct Performance Theater

By David Norman, CMC®

Published on The Consultants Peer Group website | tcpgroup.net

The fog does not announce itself. It arrives in the language of care, wraps itself in the vocabulary of trust, and by the time people feel the gap between what was promised and what is real, they have already learned the most dangerous lesson an organization can teach: that speaking up is a test, not an invitation. Performance theater does not just fail to build psychological safety, it actively destroys the conditions for it because people who have been burned by conditional safety do not simply become neutral. They become skilled at self-protection, which is the exact opposite of what genuine psychological safety requires. The research is clear on why. People calibrate their behavior to what they observed, not what they were told. And what they observed was that honesty has a ceiling, and the ceiling is wherever leadership gets uncomfortable.

What Consultants See That Leaders Cannot

Here’s what I’ve observed across decades of consulting work. Leaders who are performing psychological safety rather than building it almost never know they are doing it. The gap between stated values and actual practice accumulates slowly. One small exception to a principle. Then another. The exception becomes the unstated rule, and the principle becomes the poster on the wall.

An outside consultant sees what people inside the organization have stopped seeing. The operations manager who carefully qualifies every opinion before offering it. The senior team member who waits to see which way the leader leans before speaking. The meeting that produces unanimous agreement on every topic, every time. These are not signs of a high-trust culture. They are signs that the ceiling has been found and everyone knows where it is.

How to Name It Without Making It an Accusation

The consultant’s job in this situation is not to confront. It is to create conditions for the leader to hear what is happening. I have learned to name what I am observing without making it an indictment. Something like: “Here is what I’m seeing, and I want to make sure I understand it correctly before we go further.” That framing keeps the conversation open. It gives the leader a chance to either correct the perception or to hear themselves explain something they have not had to say out loud before. Saying it out loud, to someone who will not simply accept the explanation, is often when the fog starts to lift.

The pushback is almost always one of two things. Either the leader genuinely had not seen the gap, and naming it produces real reflection. Or the leader knew and was hoping nobody would notice. The second situation is rarer than you might expect. Most of the time, the fog is not cynical. It is the slow accumulation of accommodations that each seemed reasonable in the moment.

What Correction Actually Requires

Correcting performance theater is not a communications project. You cannot fix it by writing better values statements or running a culture survey. The correction has to happen at the behavioral level, in the specific moments when a leader chooses curiosity over defensiveness, when a concern gets heard rather than managed, when the person who spoke an uncomfortable truth is visibly better off for having done so.

That is the consultant’s real contribution here: not diagnosing the culture in a report but helping the leader practice the specific behaviors that rebuild trust one interaction at a time. Real psychological safety is not a program. It is a pattern. And patterns are built in the room, not in the offsite.

The fog lifts when leadership stops performing safety and starts paying the cost of it. That cost is real. It means hearing things you do not want to hear. It means being wrong in front of people. It means letting the conversation go where it needs to go rather than where you planned for it to go. Those are not comfortable moments. They are, however, the moments that change organizations.

That is the work. It is why consultants who are willing to name the fog, carefully and with genuine respect for the leader, are worth having in the room.

David Norman is a Certified Management Consultant® (CMC®) and member of IMC USA since 1988. His consulting practice focuses on closely-held, family-owned organizations. Learn more at tcpgroup.net or follow his writing at davidtnorman.substack.com.