The Mess That Was Already There

Conor Healy joined IAB ten years ago at an inflection point for the organization. A recent Salesforce implementation had surfaced gaps in internal process ownership and technical depth. The long-tenured C-suite understood that relying heavily on external vendors without building internal capability had limits. The moment called for a different approach.

He was stepping into a newly created role. There was no IT department to inherit, no established playbook to follow, and no track record to lean on. Leadership had already invested significant time and energy into the prior effort. Trust would need to be rebuilt carefully.

Healy did not see that as an opportunity to assign blame.

"I'm not going to come in here and lay blame," he said. "I'm going to try and look at this objectively."

No Golden Bullet

He started with a 30/60/90 framework and told them upfront what that meant. In the first 30 days, he would assess. In the next 60, he would form a view. By 90 days, he would have a plan. He was transparent from day one that there was no immediate fix coming.

What he found was a mixed picture. Some decisions had been sound. The tool choice was defensible. But the team assembled to run the implementation had been pulled together from different departments with misaligned skill sets, and the dynamics had not worked. He said as much, clearly, without framing it as indictment.

He also put the macro question to himself separately: was Salesforce the right call at all, not just the wrong execution? He assessed it at that level too, and was prepared to say so either way.

By the end of 90 days, they had a plan. What mattered most was how it had been built.

What Engineering Actually Teaches

Healy studied electronic engineering at University College Dublin. The degree did not give him a career in engineering, but it shaped how he approaches problems. The lesson was structural, not technical: you do not confront the full scale of a problem at once. You find the first chunk you can handle and move from there.

He applied the same method to the leadership team. He moved them through the thinking in stages, gave them room to respond, and incorporated what they offered. The plan grew from the exchange rather than arriving complete.

"If the team isn't coming with you," he said, "you're like a general in World War II running towards the enemy and you look around and there's nobody there."

Their Plan, Not His

The outcome of the 90 days was a plan. But the more important outcome was whose plan it was.

Healy is direct about this. In his own estimation, the plan was about 99 percent his. The people who hired him experienced it as something closer to 60/40, a shared effort they had a hand in shaping.

That is what credibility looks like in practice.

Getting leadership to a solution without making them feel directed toward it is not a communication technique. It is the actual work of building credibility in an organization with no track record of you yet.

"We had a plan that I think we all felt was our plan, not my plan," he said. "I think that was the important aspect of it."

What Credibility Actually Costs

Credibility, in Healy's version of it, is not about being right. It is about what you choose not to do when you are right.

He did not walk into a bruised organization and itemize their failures. He did not use the mandate of a new role to push through a solution.

"Whether or not it's obvious, whether or not things went wrong," he said, "I'm not going to come in here and lay blame."

In organizations that have already been burned, credibility is not granted because of title or expertise. It is granted because leaders choose partnership over vindication.