Ardern was Prime Minister of New Zealand for six years and practised a specific discipline in how she delivered hard news: direct, emotionally literate, without the softening language most political communication uses to blunt the point.

Netflix's managers noticed that the expensive part of avoiding difficult conversations wasn't the conversations themselves — it was the slow accumulation of people who were technically adequate but weren't lifting the team, who stayed because no one wanted to fire them and left because someone eventually did.