Bureaucracy Can Be the Death of Vision: What Can Leaders Learn from Boris’ Downfall?
Forget parties and Pincher for a moment. What if Boris Johnson’s real leadership problem started much earlier?
Boris Johnson’s premiership ended amid scandal.
Partygate.
Chris Pincher.
Ministerial resignations.
A Conservative Party that had finally had enough.
Those events matter. It would be absurd to pretend otherwise.
But I’ve always been interested in a different question.
Why did those events become fatal?
Because three years earlier, Boris Johnson had achieved something extraordinary.
He took a Conservative Party that had been tearing itself apart, attached it to three words everybody could understand,
GET BREXIT DONE
and won an 80-seat majority.
Love Brexit or loathe it.
Love Boris or loathe him.
As leadership communication, it was devastatingly effective.
Everybody knew where he wanted to go.
And then he got there.
What was the next mountain?
LEADERS NEED A MOUNTAIN
I’ve spent much of my working life watching leaders.
The good ones give people somewhere to go.
A destination.
A possibility.
A mountain worth climbing.
They don’t necessarily know every step required to reach it.
That’s why they need other people.
But they can point towards the summit and say:
There. That’s where we’re going.
Kennedy did it spectacularly in 1961:
Put a man on the Moon and return him safely to Earth before the decade was out.
Where?
The Moon.
When?
Before the decade was out.
Crystal clear.
Johnson’s 2019 proposition had some of the same communicative simplicity.
Get Brexit Done.
Whatever you thought of the destination, you couldn’t complain that you didn’t know where the bus was going.
THEN HE REACHED THE SUMMIT
And this is where leadership becomes difficult.
What happens when you’ve climbed the mountain?
You need another one.
Johnson’s government had plenty of policies.
Infrastructure.
Policing.
Net zero.
The NHS.
Global Britain.
And, most notably:
Levelling Up.
But was Levelling Up ever a mountain that ordinary people could actually see?
Even contemporary analysis questioned whether there was a clear strategy behind the agenda.
Compare the two:
Get Brexit Done.
You know when you’ve done it.
Level Up Britain.
What does the summit look like?
When do we arrive?
How do we know?
A slogan isn’t a vision.
And that’s where I think Johnson’s leadership began getting into trouble.
WITHOUT VISION, PEOPLE BICKER
There’s a famous biblical line:
“Where there is no vision, the people perish.”
For organisations, I’ve sometimes thought it deserves a less dramatic translation:
Where there is no vision, the people bicker.
Because when people aren’t looking up and forward, they start looking sideways.
At each other.
Departments protect territory.
Politics grows.
Meetings multiply.
Procedures accumulate.
Arguments become more important than outcomes.
The organisation turns inward.
And something else moves into the space previously occupied by vision.
Bureaucracy.
BUREAUCRACY HATES A VACUUM
Don’t misunderstand me.
Process matters.
Rules matter.
Governance matters.
Accountability matters.
NASA didn’t get Apollo 11 to the Moon through positive thinking and a motivational poster.
Thousands of extraordinarily capable people solved extraordinarily difficult technical problems.
Process made the vision possible.
But there’s an enormous difference between:
Process in service of vision
and
Process in place of vision.
The first enables.
The second suffocates.
When nobody is completely clear where they’re going, the system starts becoming preoccupied with how things are done rather than why they’re being done at all.
That’s when bureaucracy stops supporting the organisation.
And starts consuming it.
PROCESS CAN BECOME THE DEATH OF VISION
Every growing organisation faces this danger.
At the beginning, things are wonderfully simple.
The founder can see the customer.
Everybody knows everybody.
Decisions happen quickly.
Problems get solved.
Then the organisation grows.
More people.
More departments.
More meetings.
More policies.
More reporting.
More approval.
More governance.
Most of it arrives for perfectly sensible reasons.
Until one day nobody can quite remember why it takes nine people to approve something that used to take nine minutes.
Bureaucracy rarely arrives announcing that it intends to kill the vision.
It arrives offering to help.
That’s what makes it dangerous.
VISION, PURPOSE AND PROCESS
I’ve long used three questions when thinking about organisations.
Where and when?
That’s Vision.
Why and who?
That’s Purpose.
What and how?
That’s Process.
All three matter.
Vision without process is fantasy.
Process without vision is bureaucracy.
And neither will sustain people for very long without purpose.
The problem begins when one overwhelms the others.
Too much Green and everybody races towards the horizon without checking whether the bridge is finished.
Too much Red and everybody cares enormously, but nobody makes the difficult decision.
Too much Blue and the bridge has seventeen committees, a risk register and no traffic.
Capability requires all three.
SO WHAT REALLY BROUGHT BORIS DOWN?
Partygate mattered.
The Pincher affair mattered.
Trust mattered.
Judgement mattered.
And by July 2022, the withdrawal of support from his own government made Johnson’s position untenable.
But here’s the leadership question I posed then — and still think is worth asking:
Would those controversies have proved quite so politically lethal if people still believed they were being led towards a compelling destination?
That’s not a historical fact.
It’s a hypothesis about leadership.
And it matters because the same thing happens inside businesses.
When people believe in where they’re going, organisations can absorb enormous difficulty.
When they don’t, every difficulty becomes another reason to question the leadership.
The vacuum magnifies the noise.
WHAT’S YOUR NEXT MOUNTAIN?
This is where Boris Johnson stops being the subject of this article.
You are.
Perhaps you’ve built the business you dreamed of building.
Hit £1 million.
Reached 50 employees.
Opened the second office.
Completed the acquisition.
Survived the crisis.
Won the big client.
Fantastic.
Now what?
If your people don’t know, don’t be surprised when their attention turns elsewhere.
Vision isn’t something you write once at an awayday and laminate.
Every summit creates the need for another summit.
Leadership means continually answering:
Where are we going next?
AND THEN GET OUT OF THE WAY
There’s another lesson here.
The leader doesn’t have to do everything.
In fact, if they do, they become the problem.
The visionary needs the people who ask:
How?
What?
Who?
Why?
When?
What could go wrong?
What haven’t we considered?
That’s why capable leadership isn’t about producing clones.
It’s about surrounding yourself with people who can turn vision into reality.
Vision provides direction.
Purpose provides meaning.
Process provides execution.
Get them working together and you have capability.
Allow process to become the destination and you get bureaucracy.
BEWARE THE COMFORT OF PROCESS
Bureaucracy feels safe.
There’s always another meeting to attend.
Another report to request.
Another procedure to write.
Another committee to create.
Another box to tick.
Vision is harder.
Vision requires somebody to stand up and say:
This is where we’re going.
And accept responsibility for being wrong.
That’s leadership.
So here’s the question Boris Johnson’s downfall prompted me to ask in 2022 — and the question I’d still ask any leader today:
What’s your next mountain?
If you can’t see it, don’t assume your people can.
And while you’re looking for it, watch what moves into the vacuum.
Because bureaucracy doesn’t need a vision.
It just needs a form.
You can’t download capability.™
Has process started replacing purpose in your organisation?
Perfect Teams® helps leaders understand the capabilities around them, identify what’s missing and build teams capable of turning vision into action.
Originally published 8 August 2022. Updated August 2026.
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