The Action-Response Principle

The capability most leaders don’t know they’re missing
By Deano Gomes-Luis

Some leaders consistently make things land.
Messages cut through.
Changes take hold.
Decisions mobilise rather than stall.
What’s interesting is that this doesn’t always correlate with authority, charisma, or even experience. Two leaders can deliver the same message with the same intent – and get very different responses.
The difference is rarely execution.

I’ve seen this pattern repeatedly in organisations undergoing change. One team adapts quickly. Another resists. A third complies but disengages.
The initiative is the same.
The context is similar.
The outcomes diverge.
What separates them isn’t effort or competence.
It’s attunement.

Attunement is the ability to sense how an action will be received before it is delivered – and to adjust accordingly.
It’s not empathy in the abstract.
It’s not intuition without discipline.
It’s the capacity to anticipate expectation at the point of delivery and design for it.

Most organisations underinvest in this capability.
They assume that if intent is clear and execution is strong, response will follow. When it doesn’t, the explanation is often framed as resistance, misalignment, or capability gaps.
Rarely is the design of the action itself questioned.

You see the absence of attunement when:
Well–intended messages trigger defensiveness
Change programmes create compliance without commitment
“Clear” decisions create confusion rather than momentum
Nothing is wrong with the content.
The delivery simply isn’t calibrated to the moment.

The leaders who build attunement don’t slow things down.
They sharpen them.
They pay attention to timing, context, and expectation.
They notice early signals of hesitation or misunderstanding.
They adjust at the point of delivery, not weeks later through escalation.
This makes action more precise – not more cautious.

Attunement isn’t a personality trait.
It’s an organisational capability.
One that can be developed, practised, and embedded – just like execution discipline.
And once it is, the same effort starts producing very different outcomes.

Before your next announcement, change, or decision, it’s worth asking:
What expectation will people bring into this moment – and how are we designing the action to meet it?
That question often matters more than the words you choose.

Execution delivers work.
Attunement determines whether it lands.
Ignoring it doesn’t make organisations faster.
It just makes outcomes less predictable.

This article reflects ideas explored more fully in Beyond Execution, where I introduce the Action–Response Principle – a way of seeing how value is formed at the point of delivery, and why strong execution alone rarely creates the impact leaders expect.