Most companies do not fail from one big mistake. They enter a death spiral.
The pattern is simple: a bad quarter leads to one key departure. That creates more load for everyone else. Capacity drops. Stress rises. Politics gets cheaper than truth. More people burn out, more people leave, and each problem makes the next one worse.
In the book, I describe it as a loop: declining trust reduces capacity, reduced capacity increases overflow, and that overflow burns what trust remains. By the time leadership recognizes the pattern, the intervention required is often larger than the remaining trust can support.
This matters more now because the environment is melting faster. AI increases speed, output, and disruption at the same time. If your organization cannot metabolize error under pressure, more agency only accelerates the spiral.
When the quarter turns against you, do not cut the rituals, honesty, and recovery time that keep trust alive. That is how companies save cash on the way to collapse.