You are a high-ranking executive in a company that is about to create a new strategic plan. It comes on the heels of mostly poor results from the prior strategy. You sense that today’s corporate strategy should not be set aside without learning from it, but the rest of your team disagrees — led by your chief executive officer. How hard should you push?

Somewhere in the executive suite, someone knows exactly what went wrong with the prior strategy. They won’t say it — and not always for lack of courage.

Sometimes that is because the person who most needs to hear it, the chief executive officer, has quietly made the plan’s failure a referendum on himself. There is a name for what is happening. It is not stubbornness, and it is not ego in the sense most executives mean the word. It is an unlikely fusion between identity and authorship, and it predicts why the team’s next plan won’t break new ground.