INSIGHTS
Corporate Wellbeing
Theodore Issacs CMC, MBA, MSc (Oxford)
Corporate Wellbeing | When the Blueprint Fails: Understanding Burnout as a Design Failure
Practice Note
Harvard Business Review published an article, Burnout Looks Different Across the Org Chart. Watch for These Signs, by Daisy Auger-Domínguez, that deserves more than a passing share. Daisy Auger-Domínguez, author of Burnt Out to Lit Up, argues that burnout is not a personal failing but, in her words, "a design failure."
To be clear, HTM has no working relationship with her; this is an independent response to published work, not a joint view. The fields are genuinely distinct; she writes from HR and people strategy aimed at individual leaders. HTM writes from business transformation and major programme governance, aimed at boards and sponsors, not the individual leader trying to self-diagnose. Two unconnected fields reaching the same structural conclusion is stronger validation than either piece offers alone.
Her framework, burnout shaped by power and decision proximity rather than workload, taking a different form at each organisational level, is sharp and well-observed. It also stops exactly where governance work needs to begin.
Where the Framework Lands With Precision
Early-career employees** experience invisible overload: ambiguity paired with low control, spent decoding unwritten rules about authority rather than doing the work itself. Managers experience compression: "responsibility without authority," absorbing pressure from senior leaders above while protecting their teams below, with nowhere structural to put it. Executives experience sustained value conflict — she borrows the term moral injury from Jonathan Shay's research on combat veterans — chronic vigilance and isolation while integrity, not stress tolerance, is what's actually eroding. Founders experience identity collapse, where leader and organisation become indistinguishable and stepping back feels like abandonment; her own fix is governance structures that challenge the founder rather than reinforce them.
The causal claim is structural, not psychological — the same claim underlying HTM's own case for treating leadership wellbeing as a governance matter. Her prescriptions are almost entirely structural too: decision rights, priority limits, recovery built into cadence. Nowhere does she recommend a resilience app or a wellness stipend. That discipline is rare, and right.
Resolving the Four Levels Into Three Domains
Read against the architecture underlying the LRRD, these four patterns are not separate phenomena. They resolve onto Autonomy, Competence, and Relatedness — the domains Self-Determination Theory identifies as foundational to sustainable functioning, which the LRRD measures directly rather than inferring anecdotally. Early-career overload is Competence-and-Autonomy compression. Managerial compression is the same at higher stakes, plus a values-alignment strain — it is hard to commit to a plan you do not understand. Executive conflict is Autonomy's values-alignment sub-domain under pressure, compounded by a Relatedness failure: isolation, and nowhere safe to think aloud. Her own executive prescription, trusted peer forums, is in substance a Relatedness intervention.
Founder collapse resolves the same way rather than needing a fourth construct: total Autonomy boundary collapse, combined with a specific Relatedness failure — not just isolation, but no one positioned to challenge the leader's judgement. Her own fix addresses exactly that. The construct didn't need inventing; it needed the existing domains taken to their limit — which means one repeatable instrument can surface, and track over time, all four patterns her framework has no mechanism to follow.
Where This Concentrates, and How HTM's Services Would Address It
Auger-Domínguez writes about organisations generally. HTM's research argues these dynamics compress hardest in major and mega programme delivery — and her framework maps onto that environment with unusual precision.
Her managerial compression describes the programme workstream lead: accountable for delivery, rarely holding the budget or escalation authority to resolve blockers — and reaches down to the same early-career pattern one level further out. Neither is a coping problem; both are architecture problems. HTM's Target Operating Model Design service defines decision rights and governance structure directly; within a major programme, Strategic Programme Initiation & Transformation Leadership builds that architecture before delivery begins.
Her executive pattern describes the programme sponsor holding a five-year timeline against a board wanting green status while the delivery team privately knows it's amber. HTM's Leadership Resilience & Wellbeing service, informed by periodic LRRD profiling, provides the confidential space she recommends — close in spirit to the Corporate Well-Being Forum concept already under internal discussion, independent validation arrived at without any awareness HTM had been sketching the same structure.
Her founder pattern has a direct cousin in the senior responsible owner too invested in a programme's success to be the one who reports it's failing — precisely the mechanism behind the optimism bias that drives cost overrun across major programmes. HTM's Governance, Risk & Sustainability Assurance service does what she prescribes: independent risk registers and escalation points that don't depend on a programme's own leadership self-reporting accurately.
Across all four levels, the missing layer is instrumentation and trend, reported so a board can act on it. That is the LRRD's job. At programme level, this is the aggregate gap the LEWRI, in development, is intended to close — not "is this leader burning out," but what a delivery team's collective state implies about getting the programme home.
The Right Framework, Missing Its Instrument
Auger-Domínguez has written a genuinely useful diagnostic lens — her closing questions are good ones, from which decision keeps getting delayed to where availability has become a substitute for performance. But a lens applied by an individual leader, however well-designed, is not organisational intelligence. It depends entirely on the leader having the self-awareness and safety to apply it accurately to themselves — precisely the capacity compression, isolation, and identity collapse erode first. Asking a burned-out executive to diagnose their own moral injury is asking the affected instrument to calibrate itself.
Her central claim is correct: burnout is a design failure, and the fix is redesigning work rather than demanding endurance. Her framework resolves cleanly onto the same three constructs grounding HTM's own instrument — a stronger form of validation than either piece could offer alone. What it cannot do is turn diagnosis into organisational intelligence: something a board can see, track, and act on before the pattern crystallises into departure or delivery failure. That is the difference between a good lens and a governance instrument, and it is what HTM's Leadership Risk Intelligence platform, paired with the structural services that turn diagnosis into redesign, is built to be.
The redesign she calls for is easy to agree with. Knowing where to point it first, with evidence rather than instinct, is what most organisations still cannot do.
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