When You Catch a Lot of Flak, You’re Directly Over the Target
Someone shared a quote with me recently that stopped me cold.
“When you catch a lot of flak, it means you are directly over the target.”
I don’t know who said it first. Doesn’t matter. What matters is that it’s true; and I’ve lived it enough times to feel it in my bones.
The original was literal. WWII bomber crews flying B-17s and B-24s over occupied Europe learned quickly that the intensity of anti-aircraft fire, flak (short for the German Fliegerabwehrkanonen) was directly proportional to their proximity to the target. The Germans weren’t stupid. They concentrated their guns where it mattered most. Refineries. Rail yards. Command infrastructure. The more valuable the target, the thicker the flak.
The crews could tell before they even saw the objective. The black puffs would start thinning or thickening. Thin meant you were still approaching. Thick meant you were close. Very thick meant you were exactly where you needed to be.
They didn’t turn back. The mission was the mission.
But here’s the part of that metaphor nobody wants to say out loud: a lot of those crews didn’t come home.
I think about that constantly when I’m deep into a transformation engagement.
Here’s what I’ve learned after 40 years of walking into organizations and trying to help them get better: the resistance doesn’t start when you show up. It starts when you get close to something real.
In the first weeks of an engagement, everyone is cordial. Cooperative. Eager, even. The meetings are productive, the data flows, the conversations are open. They’ve hired you, after all.
Then something shifts.
It usually happens around week 6 or week 8. Sometimes sooner. You’ve dug past the surface dysfunction – the late deliveries, the poor throughput, the finger-pointing between departments – and you’ve found the actual problem underneath. Not the symptom. The root.
That’s when the flak starts.
In my experience, organizational resistance comes in two distinct flavors. They look similar on the surface. They require completely different responses underneath.
The first is fear of change itself. People are creatures of habit. They’ve built their workflows, their careers, their entire professional identity around a set of assumptions about how things work. Even when those assumptions are wrong – even when the evidence is screaming at them – there is genuine psychological comfort in the familiar. The devil you know.
This kind of resistance is loud but it’s not personal. The person pushing back isn’t protecting themselves so much as they’re protecting their world. With patience, transparency, and enough early wins to demonstrate that the new way works, this kind of resistance can be converted. It takes time. It’s real. But it’s workable.
The second is fear of exposure.
This is the one nobody talks about. This is where the flak gets truly dangerous.
When you get close to a root cause, you get close to the person – or the team – whose decisions, whose inaction, whose incompetence created it. And they know it. Sometimes consciously. Sometimes buried so deep they can’t even admit it to themselves.
But they know.
The resistance here is different. It’s not philosophical. It’s existential. They’re not fighting the change. They’re fighting you. They’re fighting the truth. They’ll undermine the data, question your methodology, go around you to leadership, manufacture competing priorities. They’ll weaponize process. “We should really run this through the committee” or “Legal needs to review this” or “Let’s wait for the quarterly review” or something similar. I know you’ve heard and seen this for yourself.
And the more accurate your diagnosis, the harder they’ll fight. Because the more accurate your diagnosis, the more they’re exposed.
Here’s what I’ve come to understand: the intensity of the resistance is a diagnostic signal, not a stop sign.
When someone digs in hard – not thoughtfully pushes back, but digs in hard – my first question isn’t “how do I overcome this resistance?” Rather, it’s “what are they protecting?”
That question changes everything. Because the answer usually leads you exactly where you need to go.
I’ve walked into rooms where three people are aggressively blocking an improvement initiative. Standard stuff; nothing radical, nothing expensive, nothing that should threaten anyone. But three people are treating it like a siege. And when you eventually peel back why, you find it every time: the current process, dysfunctional as it is, hides something they don’t want visible. Excess headcount. Poor decisions buried in workarounds. Numbers that don’t hold up under scrutiny.
The flak tells you where the target is.
Here’s the brutal part that most change leaders won’t say out loud:
Sometimes the problem is the person in the room.
Not metaphorically. Literally. The root cause of the dysfunction you’ve been hired to fix is sitting across the conference table from you, nodding along, and doing everything in their power to make sure you never get to the bottom of it.
This is not comfortable. No one enjoys being the one to surface it. And it doesn’t make you popular. But if you’re serious about transformation – if you’ve been hired to actually fix something and not just facilitate a theater of improvement – you can’t flinch.
The worst outcomes I’ve witnessed in transformation work aren’t the ones where a team struggles to execute the change. They’re the ones where everyone in the room knows what the real problem is and no one will say it. Where the flak is so thick, so sustained, so political that the pilot pulls up and flies home without dropping the payload.
The company never improves. The dysfunction institutionalizes. And the people who know the truth eventually get tired of knowing; and either leave or go quiet.
The organization “successfully completes” the change initiative. Nothing changes.
There’s something important I need to say here, and it cuts against the narrative you usually hear about organizational resistance.
The rank and file are almost never the problem.
I mean that without reservation. The people on the shop floor, in the cube farms, managing the queues and working the processes; they know the dysfunction better than anyone. They live in it every day. They’ve submitted the suggestions that went nowhere. They’ve watched the same problems repeat for years. They’ve stopped saying anything because nobody listened.
When I show up and I’m actually willing to listen – when I look at their situation from their perspective, when I acknowledge that the system they’re working in is broken and that it’s not their fault – they open up. Every time. They become the most valuable source of truth in the entire engagement. They’ll tell you exactly where the bodies are buried, because they’re the ones who’ve been tripping over them.
The resistance I’m describing – the existential, self-protective, dig-in-and-fight-back resistance – that comes from the top. It comes from the people whose status, whose budget, whose career narrative depends on the dysfunction continuing. The rank and file don’t have that stake. They want the help. They’ve been waiting for someone to show up and actually mean it.
Remember that. It matters for how you do this work and who you trust when the flak starts flying.
Now here’s the part I really don’t want to tell you, but I’d be lying if I left it out.
Sometimes you hold your heading, stay straight and level, push through every bit of the resistance; and you still get shot down.
I’ve had it happen. More than once. You’ve done the diagnosis right. You’ve built the evidence. You’ve named the problem clearly and professionally and without malice. And then the sponsor folds. The executive who hired you decides the political cost is too high. The board doesn’t have the stomach for it. The person whose incompetence you’ve exposed turns out to have more allies than you knew – or more leverage, or more history with the CEO – and suddenly the engagement gets “paused.” Then cancelled. Then you’re persona non grata, and six months later you hear they hired someone else who told them everything was basically fine with a few minor adjustments.
That’s being shot down.
It’s not the same as failure. But it feels like it.
In the U.S. Eighth Air Force in 1943, crews were expected to perform 25 combat missions. Most never made it past their fifth. The flak didn’t care how good they were. The guns were just that heavy over a target that mattered that much.
There are organizations like that.
My personal tendency – developed over 40 years and more than a few scars – is to press on.
Not blindly. Not out of stubbornness. But because I’ve learned that the mission doesn’t end when it gets dangerous. It ends when it’s completed, or when it’s physically taken from you.
When the politics mobilize against me, I don’t retreat. I document the crap out of everything. Every finding, every conversation, every red flag waved and dismissed. I shine a light into every crevice imaginable. Because if I’m going down, I’m going down having made absolutely sure the truth is on the record; in writing, distributed, impossible to un-see. If the politics win, they win. That’s outside my control. What’s inside my control is how much truth I leave behind when they do.
That documentation has a longer life than people expect. I’ve had work I did resurface two or three years later when leadership changed and someone finally asked the right questions. The report that couldn’t be presented became the roadmap for the next attempt. The truth doesn’t expire just because someone chose to suppress it.
So, I press on. I hold my heading. And if I take a hit that takes me out of the fight, I know it was politics that did it; not a failure of diagnosis, not a failure of nerve, not a failure of execution. Politics won. That’s a different thing.
The only time I walk away on my own terms is when two conditions are both true: I don’t respect the senior leadership, and I genuinely can’t make an impact. Both must be present. One isn’t enough.
If I don’t respect the leadership but I’m still moving the needle for the people in the organization – still making things better for the rank and file who’ve been waiting for someone to care – I stay. The mission matters more than my opinion of the people at the top.
If I respect the leadership but we’re genuinely stuck – the organization isn’t ready, the timing is wrong, the structural conditions can’t be overcome yet – I stay engaged, recalibrate, and find a different angle of attack. That’s not retreat. That’s tactics.
But when the leadership is not worth working for and the engagement has become an exercise in political theater with no real impact possible? That’s when I leave. Cleanly. Professionally. And with every finding documented and delivered to whoever will receive it.
You earn the right to walk away. You don’t take it.
So, what do you do when the flak gets heavy?
You don’t slow down. You accelerate.
Not recklessly. Not blindly. But with intention. Because the resistance is telling you that you’re close, and close is exactly where you need to be.
Document everything. When the data is being questioned, have more data. When your methodology is being challenged, have more methodology. When you’re being told you don’t understand the business, understand it better than anyone in the room.
And remember, sometimes you can be mistaken and need to make a tactical adjustment.
But don’t negotiate away the target. This is the most common failure mode. You feel the resistance – it’s uncomfortable, the relationship is strained, everyone looks unhappy – so you compromise. You soften the finding. You bury the conclusion. You write “opportunities for improvement” where the honest word is “negligence.”
That’s not transformation. That’s theater. And the people who’ve been waiting for someone to actually fix things deserve better than theater.
There’s a reason bomber crews were trained to hold their heading through the flak. The instinct – the entirely human, entirely rational instinct – was to maneuver. To jink. To get out of the fire.
But jinking breaks your aim. You miss the target. You fly home with your bombs. And the refineries keep running.
The discipline was to hold straight and level, through the worst of it, until the payload was away or the mission was physically taken from you.
Knowing full well you might not come home.
That’s the job.
Forty years of this work has taught me that the people who most need to change are the ones who will fight hardest to prevent it. That the loudest voices in the room are often the ones with the most to lose. That the people on the ground – the ones living inside the dysfunction every day – are almost always your greatest allies if you treat them like it. And that the moment you feel like maybe you should back off, dial it down, make it easier on everyone; that is precisely the moment to press on harder, document more thoroughly, and shine the light into every crevice you can find.
If you get shot down, it’s because the politics won.
That’s on them.
Hold your heading.
Good hunting.
About the Author
Paris is an international expert in the field of Operational Excellence, organizational design, strategy design and deployment, and helping companies become high-performance organizations. His vehicles for change include being the Founder of; the XONITEK Group of Companies; the Operational Excellence Society; and the Readiness Institute.
He is a sought-after speaker and lecturer and his book, “State of Readiness” has been endorsed by senior leaders at some of the most respected companies in the world.
Click here to learn more about Joseph Paris or connect with him on Linkedin.
