When a proven executive begins making decisions that no longer fit their record
It is one of the more difficult situations a board can face. A senior leader with a long history of sound judgment starts making choices that are uncharacteristic, and at times erratic. The decisions surprise the people who have relied on this person for years. The executive shows little sign of recognising that anything has changed.
When this pattern appears, the cause is often a degradation of the executive's cognitive and emotional performance under sustained pressure. Dr. Stavros Therianos, who leads Therianos Advisory, has given this phenomenon a name: self-concealing performance loss.
It describes a decline that the executive cannot reliably detect in themselves, because the capacity for accurate self-assessment degrades alongside the performance it would assess. The organisation registers the consequences first. The executive may not register them at all. The same pattern appears wherever one individual's judgment carries enterprise weight, whether a chief executive, another C-level officer, a managing partner, or a divisional head whose decisions carry comparable consequence.
The detection problem
Under sustained pressure, an executive's decision-making quality can degrade. That much is well understood and widely discussed. The harder problem is detection. The faculty an executive would use to notice the degradation, the capacity for accurate self-assessment, is itself among the first to weaken under load. The instrument and the subject become one. An executive under pressure can therefore lose the ability to evaluate their own judgment at the same time, and for the same reason, that the judgment itself declines.
For a board, this carries a specific consequence. The channels through which a board normally learns about its chief executive or another senior leader, the executive's own account, the absence of complaint, the reassurance offered in a private conversation, are the channels this phenomenon quietly disables. By the time the loss is visible in results, in a missed quarter, a flawed acquisition, the departure of senior talent, it has usually been present for some time. Boards monitor financial performance, strategy, and compliance with rigour. The cognitive and emotional operating capacity of the person making every consequential decision is an input of comparable weight that carries no instrument.
What reliable measurement requires
If self-assessment is compromised, the only dependable signal comes from outside the executive. Cognitive and emotional performance has to be measured directly, through a method that does not rest on the executive's own report.
The measurement has a human condition as well. An executive extends honest access only to someone they regard as a genuine peer. This calls for an uncommon combination in one person: the scientific training to conduct a rigorous assessment, together with enough first-hand experience of executive operating responsibility that the executive grants the access a peer would receive.
Therianos Advisory
Therianos Advisory was built to be that instrument. It provides confidential, science-based assessment and ongoing performance assurance for senior executives operating under prolonged pressure.
It is led by Dr. Stavros Therianos. He holds a PhD in the life sciences, specialising in neurobiology, from the University of Basel, and a master's in psychology from the University of Lausanne, and has held academic positions at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Rochester. He spent more than twenty years in the C-suite of Swiss biotech and healthtech, including as founder and chief executive of a venture-backed company that raised over CHF 25'000'000 in institutional capital. He is a scientist who has carried executive operating responsibility himself.
Engagements are most often commissioned by the party that carries the financial exposure: a board, an investor, or an executive search firm protecting a senior placement. Executives also engage the advisory directly. They are structured as leadership continuity risk management. A confidentiality framework, agreed in writing before any work begins, separates what the executive discloses in private from the signal the commissioning party receives. Replacement of a senior executive runs between 90 and 200 percent of annual compensation [1], which for senior Swiss executive pay places the cost of a single unplanned departure in the range of CHF 760'000 to CHF 1'300'000. Performance assurance is commissioned against that exposure.
Questions
How can a board tell whether a chief executive's judgment is still intact?
Through direct measurement rather than inference from the executive's own account. The assessment establishes a baseline across cognitive load, decision patterns, sleep and recovery, and emotional regulation under institutional pressure, then tracks movement against that baseline over time. A single reading describes a moment. A series describes a trajectory, which is what a board needs.
How does this differ from executive coaching?
Executive coaching develops leadership skill, strategy, and stakeholder judgment. This advisory addresses the cognitive and emotional capacity that determines whether those skills remain available under sustained pressure. The two are compatible, and a number of executives hold both at once.
What does the commissioning party see, and what remains private?
A confidentiality framework is agreed in writing before any work begins. The commissioning party receives an aggregate performance signal, session attendance, and general trajectory against baseline. Session content, personal disclosures, and underlying data stay with the executive and are never shared. Both parties sign. Without that separation an executive would not disclose honestly, and the measurement would carry no value.
Is this therapy or psychological assessment?
The advisory does not provide therapy or psychological assessment, and it does not diagnose. It addresses performance under sustained professional pressure. Where a clinical need becomes apparent, the appropriate step is referral to a locally licensed provider, and the advisory makes that referral.
When is the right point to commission an engagement?
Before the pattern reaches the numbers. The common triggers are a newly appointed chief executive in a demanding first year, an integration or restructuring, a fundraise, a prolonged period of board or market pressure, or a specific observation that a leader's decisions have changed character. An engagement commissioned after the loss is visible in results is addressing a later-stage problem.
Can an executive engage the advisory directly?
Yes. Most engagements are commissioned by a board, an investor, or a search firm, and executives also engage the advisory directly and in confidence. The method is identical. Where there is no commissioning party there is no reporting line, and the engagement remains entirely between the executive and Dr. Therianos.
Contact
The appropriate next step is a confidential conversation about a specific situation. Dr. Therianos can be reached directly.
Dr. Stavros Therianos
stavros@therianos-advisory.space
Lausanne, Switzerland