Over the last three decades, I have worked across the full spectrum of business, from mega-corporations in the United States and Vietnam to nimble startups with teams that could fit around a single table. I have sat in rooms with global CEOs and I have watched interns experience their first onboarding session. Across countries, industries, and scales, one truth has become increasingly clear to me. The most dangerous decisions in any company are not always made out of ignorance. They are often made out of hallucination.
Let me explain.
At the highest levels of an organization, what you might call the oxygen-thin atmosphere of leadership, vision becomes currency. Senior leaders are constantly asked to predict, to evangelize, to imagine what does not yet exist. It is their job to inspire boards, to mobilize teams, to convince investors, to manage public narratives, and to do all this while responding to real-time data, political shifts, economic tremors, and internal turbulence.
In that pressure cooker, hallucination is not an error. It is almost a feature.
I have seen it firsthand. One particular CEO I worked under led a global company with more than eighty thousand employees. He was razor sharp, a true strategist. But in private meetings, I often saw him mentally oscillate between immense ambition and internal doubt. He would describe market shifts that had not yet occurred as if they were unfolding in front of him. When he missed the mark, his team had to reverse-engineer justifications. Not because he was foolish. But because when you are at the top, you are often forced to see before you know.
And then there is the drop.
This is what I call the altitude crash. In the same day, that same executive would walk into a boardroom filled with analysts and forecasts, then two hours later step into his kitchen, helping his child with homework or listening to his partner talk about groceries. That sharp descent, from leading a $10 billion operation to bedtime stories and kitchen counters, is not just emotional whiplash. It is neurological. And when that cycle repeats day after day, it becomes disorienting. Michelle Obama once described how Barack would come home carrying the weight of the White House, unable to detach for hours. That is not an exaggeration. That is chemical.
Now contrast this with the other end of the spectrum, the new hire, the intern, the entry-level analyst.
This hallucination is different. It is not predictive. It is reactive. It is born of uncertainty, not pressure. These employees are new. They are figuring things out. A single email can send them into a spiral of assumptions. A vague meeting invite can feel like a career-defining moment. Their hallucination is natural. They lack reference points. They are running simulations in the dark. It is not misjudgment. It is cognitive overreaction. They are building maps without knowing the terrain.
And then we arrive at the middle.
This, in my view, is the most overlooked and most valuable layer in any organization, particularly now, as AI starts to destabilize traditional hierarchies.
The middle layer team leads, senior managers, directors, operational anchors they are close enough to reality to know what is working. They are distant enough from politics to maintain perspective. They have seen cycles. They carry institutional memory. And they often become the emotional regulators of the organization. While the top hallucinates and the bottom overreacts, the middle calibrates.
In one of the best-run startups I advised, the founder was often tempted by market trends. He would get caught up in the vision of AI disruption, shifting strategy every few weeks. It was his head of operations a former project manager turned stabilizer who kept the company grounded. She tracked velocity, measured outcomes, and quietly re-aligned the team without breaking his momentum. She did not resist his vision. She absorbed it, filtered it, and executed the version that would not break the company.
That is the value of the middle layer. They convert hallucination into traction.
Now consider what this means in the age of AI.
AI tools today are intensifying both ends of the hallucination spectrum. At the top, leaders have access to endless projections, generative analytics, and real-time simulations. It becomes easier than ever to convince yourself that a trend is truth. At the entry level, tools like ChatGPT and automated dashboards create an illusion of understanding employees generate confident answers without fully grasping the context behind them.
The only way to stabilize this loop is to empower the center.
Great leaders must learn to tune into the frequency of their middle managers. Not to offload tasks, but to extract judgment. That layer holds the company’s ability to course correct. They are the ones who know when a launch timeline is not realistic, when a partner is losing faith, or when the culture is quietly shifting in a dangerous direction.
As a CEO, your job is not just to broadcast vision. It is to know where to seek reality checks. When the boardroom becomes an echo chamber and the frontline is overwhelmed by noise, the middle remains your best shot at clarity.
You do not need more dashboards. You need more grounded conversations.
And if you want to lead through what is coming, not just AI adoption, but the deeper waves of integration, confusion, and misuse, then learn to anchor yourself in the middle. Find that layer in your organization. Cultivate it. Trust it.
Because hallucination is not going away. Not at the top. Not at the bottom. But in the middle, there is balance.
And the leaders who learn to see through that lens, not to suppress the noise, but to steer through it, will be the ones who build companies that not only move fast, but last.
Ben
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