Monday morning, glass meeting room, thirteenth floor. Victor is twenty-nine, with three data screens open and one deep conviction: the new customer journey, tested over six weeks, converts 22 % better than the old one. He has the numbers, the screenshots, the user verbatims. He finishes his presentation, heart pounding, sure he has won.
At the head of the table, the managing director sets down his coffee cup. “Interesting, Victor. But I’ve been in the field for twenty-five years, and I feel it differently. We keep the old journey.” Silence in the room. Nobody objects. Six weeks of experimentation just died in a single sentence. Victor closes his screens. Something in his eyes has gone dark.
You have just witnessed a phenomenon that has a name, and that name is a gift for anyone who loves words: the HiPPO.
An Animal More Dangerous Than It Looks
In data jargon, HiPPO stands for “Highest Paid Person’s Opinion,” the opinion of the best-paid person in the room. The term was popularized by Avinash Kaushik, Google’s analytics evangelist, in his book Web Analytics: An Hour a Day (Kaushik). The principle is simple: when a decision becomes hard and the data does not settle it on its own, the organization falls back on the view of the highest salary. Rarely by calculation. Most often by pure reflex.
The wink is delicious, because the hippopotamus looks like a placid herbivore while ranking among the most dangerous animals in Africa: territorial and unpredictable, ready to charge anything that enters its water. The boardroom HiPPO behaves much the same way. It seems benevolent, it “feels things,” then it crushes with one word an experiment that no one will dare defend afterward.
So much for the beast. Now to the confusion that costs careers and entire projects.
One Letter, Two Destinies
Remove one P and you get a very different animal: the HiPo, the “High Potential.” This is the employee that human resources teams train and desperately try to keep because they embody the next generation. Gartner defines high potential through three combined qualities: ability, aspiration and engagement (Gartner).
The irony sits in a detail everyone sees without noticing. These two creatures share the same room. Victor is a HiPo. The director who just shut him down is a HiPPO. A single letter separates them on paper. In corporate reality, a chasm divides them: one brings the future, the other protects the present. The phonetic mix-up is amusing at a seminar. Its organizational version is far less funny.
The figures tell an embarrassing story. According to Gartner, 65 % of companies redirect budgets from other talent initiatives to fund their high-potential programs, yet only 25 % of HR leaders consider their HiPo strategy genuinely successful (Gartner). So you invest heavily to attract Victors, then you run meetings where the HiPPO silences them. You pay for the fuel and you cut the ignition.
I write it in my book, in the chapter on communication and decision-making: refusing to do the work of making information clear and easy to act on is a form of self-sabotage, for the project and for you (My book, chapter 10).
The HiPPO adds a layer to that sabotage. Even when the information is crystal clear, it covers it with intuition, and the intuition of a high salary weighs more than a dashboard in the eyes of a room looking for reassurance.
The Bias That Rules the Room
Why does the room stay silent? Because of a mechanism I see at work in almost every organization: authority bias. We spontaneously grant more credit to whoever we perceive as an expert or a superior, and we do what they tell us to do (Forbes). This reflex is not individual cowardice. Bertrand Duperrin puts it well: when the system no longer knows how to decide, it falls back on hierarchy, because authority reassures and offers immediate consistency, however fragile or illusory (Duperrin).
Here is where it gets spicy. The more companies proclaimed themselves “data-driven,” the more they ended up legitimizing decisions that had already been made in advance (Duperrin). Data then stops informing the choice and starts dressing it up. The HiPPO has decided, and afterward everyone hunts for the chart that will prove it right. Confirmation bias, which I describe at length in my book, comes to reinforce authority bias, and the pair becomes formidable (My book).
Let us pause honestly. On a scale of 0 to 5, how much of a HiPPO do you think you are in your own meetings? Do not answer too fast. I am not always at 0 on that scale, and the admission is where the work begins. In my keynotes, an experiment on status quo bias shows that between 85 % and 90 % of the audience makes the decision the bias dictates (My book). We are all wired the same way, from intern to director.
When the HiPPO Devours the HiPos
The danger comes from the cumulative effect. A Victor who gets shut down three times stops proposing. Then he leaves. And he leaves precisely for the competitor who will listen to his data. You trained a high potential so he could go feed the order book across the street.
The Ron Johnson story is a textbook case. Architect of the Apple Store success, he became CEO of J.C. Penney and rolled out his strategy without seriously consulting existing customer data; few people around him had the courage to tell him the unvarnished truth (Forbes). The result was one of the most talked-about wrecks in American retail. Past success had built a HiPPO, and the HiPPO had stopped listening.
A Rotterdam School of Management study cited by Bernard Marr drives the point home: projects led by senior leaders failed more often than those led by junior managers, precisely because the juniors received frank criticism that strengthened their plans (Forbes). Power buys silence, and silence carries a heavy price.
I have said it for years: our past success can be our greatest enemy. It blinds us and replaces humility with overconfidence. The HiPPO is simply the organizational form of that poison, seated at the head of the table with a coffee.
How to Tame Your HiPPO
Good news: a HiPPO can be tamed, provided you act on the process rather than on the people. Here are five concrete moves you can apply in your very next meeting.
- The leader speaks last. Aviation understood this with Crew Resource Management: the captain speaks after the crew to preserve cognitive diversity before authority validates or invalidates (Duperrin). Reverse the speaking order and you will see ideas surface that the HiPPO would have crushed without even noticing.
- Separate opinion from data. Before every decision, ask a simple question: are we talking about a verifiable fact or an intuition? A HiPPO’s opinion is often presented as fact while remaining subjective (Forbes). Name it for what it is, and its power drops at once.
- Kill the assumption with experimentation. Assumptions are dangerous and must be tested as early as possible. A six-week pilot like Victor’s brings more certainty than twenty-five years of “I feel it.”
- Make the decision easy to take. Present topics in a structured and simple way; that clarity is the responsibility of the project owner as much as the decision-maker (My book). A HiPPO charges all the harder when it feels lost.
- Cultivate psychological safety. Without it, no one will tell the CEO the project is on fire. It is a whole pillar of my system, and without it the four previous moves stay dead letters.
One last image for the road. The hippopotamus only turns dangerous in its water, on its territory. Change the ground, open the floor, bring the data into the light, and the beast becomes what it should always have been: a leader who decides better because they first listened better.
The essentials
Remember three things:
- One letter separates the HiPo, your high potential who brings the future, from the HiPPO, the best-paid opinion that protects the present; both often sit at the same table.
- The HiPPO is an authority bias, amplified by past success and by confirmation bias; you are subject to it too, so rate yourself on the 0 to 5 scale.
- Tame the HiPPO through process: the leader speaks last, opinion is separated from data, the assumption is tested, the decision is made easy, and psychological safety is cultivated.
Innovate or agonize, the choice is up to you.
References
- (My book) https://philippeboulanger.com/book/
- (Kaushik) https://www.kaushik.net/avinash/seven-steps-to-creating-a-data-driven-decision-making-culture/
- (Forbes) https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2017/10/26/data-driven-decision-making-beware-of-the-hippo-effect/
- (Gartner) https://www.gartner.com/en/human-resources/insights/leadership-management/high-potentials
- (Duperrin) https://www.duperrin.com/english/2025/12/11/hippo-opinion-decision/
- (Smartpedia) https://t2informatik.de/en/smartpedia/hippo-effect/
