With hindsight, the warning signs for serious people, culture and conduct issues can seem obvious. Concerns had been raised in some quarters and certain behaviours were already visible.

Over the years, I've come to think that this perspective misses something important.

More often, the warning signs are remarkably ordinary. It might be a conversation that everyone agrees needs to happen, but somehow never does. A colleague who appears a little more withdrawn than they used to be. A "high performer" whose behaviour is regularly excused. A mid-level people manager who has been operating beyond a sustainable pace for so long that their workload has simply become accepted as normal.

Each event can seem an insignificant crumb.

Each event can be safely ignored.

Each event has a perfectly reasonable-sounding explanation.

The difficulty is that we rarely experience patterns, we experience individual moments. The picture only becomes clear when someone joins the dots.

That's one reason why many firms underestimate cultural risk. They react to incidents when what they should be looking for are trajectories.