Why treating people and organizations as predictable systems can limit the very performance we’re trying to improve.
— 10-minute read
Imagine purchasing a new piece of equipment for your organization.
You expect it to perform a particular function. You establish the operating procedures, train the people who will use it, and determine what successful performance looks like.
If something goes wrong, you investigate the cause. Perhaps a component needs replacing, a process needs adjusting or an operator requires additional training.
You identify the problem, make the correction and expect the equipment to function properly again.
This approach makes perfect sense when we’re dealing with machines.
The trouble begins when we assume organizations work the same way.
We design organizational charts, establish processes, assign responsibilities and develop performance measures. When something isn’t working, we look for the part that needs fixing.
Perhaps communication is poor, so we introduce another meeting.
Perhaps employees aren’t meeting expectations, so we implement more detailed performance measures.
Perhaps decisions are taking too long, so we clarify reporting relationships or introduce an additional approval process.
Sometimes these interventions work beautifully.
Other times, despite our best efforts, the organization becomes more complicated, employees become more frustrated and the original problem remains.
Why?
Because an organization isn’t simply a collection of parts performing predetermined functions. It’s a network of people who are continuously interpreting, responding to and influencing one another.
And that distinction changes how we should think about organizational excellence.
Why we became so attached to the machine
The mechanical view of organizations didn’t appear by accident.
Many traditional management practices emerged during periods when industrial production was transforming the economy. Standardization, specialization, efficiency and predictable output became essential to managing increasingly large operations.
These approaches created enormous value.
We learned to break complex work into manageable tasks, establish clear responsibilities, measure performance and develop processes that allowed organizations to deliver products and services consistently.
Much of modern management still depends on these principles.
And with good reason.
Nobody wants a hospital that treats infection control as an opportunity for individual experimentation. We expect an engineering firm to follow appropriate technical standards. We want organizations handling public funds to maintain reliable financial controls.
Structure, consistency and accountability matter.
The problem isn’t the existence of systems and processes.
It’s the assumption that the same logic can explain and control everything happening inside an organization.
People aren’t passive components.
They develop relationships, interpret information, form opinions, respond emotionally, negotiate expectations and adapt their behaviour to the environments in which they work.
And those environments are changing constantly, often in ways that nobody has deliberately designed.
The organization on paper and the organization that actually exists
Consider an organization with a beautifully designed organizational chart.
Every employee has a clear reporting relationship. Responsibilities have been documented. Decision-making authority is established, and the formal structure appears entirely logical.
On paper, everything makes sense.
But now imagine watching how the organization actually operates.
Perhaps employees regularly consult a respected colleague who has no formal management authority because they trust her judgement.
Perhaps important decisions happen through informal conversations before anyone raises them at a leadership meeting.
Perhaps a manager technically has the authority to approve something but hesitates because previous leaders have reacted negatively when people exercised independent judgement.
Or perhaps a new employee quickly learns that the official procedure is quite different from how experienced colleagues actually get things done.
None of this necessarily appears in the organizational chart.
Yet these informal relationships, expectations and experiences can have an enormous influence on performance.
An organizational chart tells us how authority is intended to flow.
It doesn’t necessarily tell us how influence, information, trust or work actually move through the organization.
That’s an important distinction.
If we only examine the formal structure, we may completely misunderstand why an organization behaves the way it does.
And when we misunderstand the system, even sensible interventions can produce unexpected results.
Why fixing one thing can create three new problems
Let’s imagine a growing nonprofit where staff are struggling to keep up with demand.
Leadership decides that the solution is to introduce a more comprehensive system for tracking activities and reporting outcomes.
The intention is reasonable. Better information should help the organization allocate resources, demonstrate accountability to funders and identify opportunities for improvement.
But implementing the new system creates additional administrative work.
Employees now spend more time entering data and less time delivering services.
Managers begin relying heavily on the new reports, encouraging staff to prioritize activities that are easy to measure.
Over time, employees may become more cautious about undertaking complex work because it doesn’t fit neatly into the established reporting categories.
The organization now has better documentation.
But has it become more effective?
Possibly. It depends on how the information is used, what other work it displaces and whether the new system reflects what the organization is actually trying to accomplish.
This is an example of why systems thinking matters.
When we change one element of an organization, we’re rarely changing only that element.
We’re also changing the relationships, incentives, information flows and constraints that connect it to everything else.
Systems thinker Donella Meadows explored these relationships in her influential essay, Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System.
Meadows argued that changing a system’s numbers or parameters is often less powerful than changing its information flows, rules, goals or underlying assumptions.
In organizational terms, this means that adjusting a performance target might have less impact than examining why the organization prioritizes that target in the first place.
Or that revising a job description might accomplish very little if the underlying culture continues to discourage employees from making decisions.
The challenge is to understand what is producing the behaviour we’re observing rather than assuming the most visible problem is also the most important one.
Not every organizational problem is the same kind of problem
One of the most useful distinctions leaders can make is between problems that can be solved through expertise and problems that require learning through experimentation.
Think about implementing a new payroll system.
The work may be complicated. There are technical requirements, legislation, integrations, deadlines and potential risks.
But with appropriate expertise and planning, many of the relationships between actions and outcomes can be understood in advance.
Now compare that with trying to improve trust between two departments that have developed a history of conflict.
You can create opportunities for collaboration, establish shared goals and improve communication practices.
But you can’t guarantee that trust will emerge on a predetermined schedule.
People’s experiences, interpretations and reactions influence what happens next.
The second challenge is complex in a fundamentally different way.
Researchers Cynthia Kurtz and Dave Snowden explored these distinctions in their 2003 paper, The New Dynamics of Strategy: Sense-Making in a Complex and Complicated World.
Their work introduced the Cynefin framework as a way of understanding different decision-making contexts.
A particularly useful insight is that complex situations cannot always be understood fully before we act. Instead, we may need to conduct small, informed experiments, observe what happens and adapt our approach.
Consider a leadership team trying to develop a stronger culture of collaboration.
Rather than introducing a comprehensive organization-wide initiative immediately, it might begin with a pilot involving two departments.
The team could test new ways of sharing information, making decisions or coordinating work.
Then it would pay attention not only to whether the pilot achieved its intended result, but also to what unexpected behaviours or relationships emerged.
What worked? What created resistance? What did people interpret differently than anticipated?
The next step would be informed by what the organization learned.
This isn’t a substitute for planning.
It’s a recognition that some outcomes cannot be fully predicted through planning alone.
People respond to meaning, not just instructions
There’s another limitation to mechanical thinking that deserves particular attention.
When leaders introduce change, they often focus heavily on explaining what will happen.
They communicate new procedures, describe revised responsibilities and outline implementation timelines.
These details are important.
But employees are also trying to understand what the change means.
Will I still be valued here?
Does this suggest that the work I’ve been doing wasn’t good enough?
Will I have more influence or less?
Is this going to make my job easier, or is it another initiative that creates additional work?
Do I trust the people making these decisions?
Two employees receiving exactly the same information may reach very different conclusions.
Those conclusions influence their behaviour, which in turn influences how the change unfolds.
This is one reason organizational change can be so unpredictable.
Leaders may believe they’ve communicated a straightforward operational adjustment, while employees experience a significant change to their identity, security, relationships or sense of competence.
If we interpret every hesitant response as resistance, we miss the information those responses might contain.
Sometimes an employee identifies a genuine flaw in the proposed approach.
Sometimes their concern reflects previous organizational experiences.
Sometimes they simply haven’t had an opportunity to understand the rationale or contribute their expertise.
An organization that treats these responses as information rather than obstacles has a greater opportunity to learn.
Structure still matters. It just isn’t the whole story.
It’s easy to take the machine metaphor too far in the opposite direction.
If organizations are complex and human behaviour is unpredictable, should we abandon formal structures, standardized processes and performance measures?
Absolutely not.
Complexity isn’t an argument for chaos.
The goal isn’t to replace structure with spontaneity. It’s to develop structures that support the kinds of relationships, decisions and behaviours the organization needs.
For example, clear decision-making authority can reduce unnecessary conflict and uncertainty.
Reliable financial systems can create the confidence required to experiment responsibly.
Well-designed processes can free employees from repetitive administrative work, giving them more time to exercise judgement where it matters.
And consistent performance measures can help organizations notice patterns they would otherwise miss.
The question is whether these systems are supporting organizational performance or simply creating the appearance of control.
A useful process should help people do their work.
A useful measurement should inform decisions.
A useful organizational structure should make it easier for people to coordinate their efforts toward shared goals.
When a system stops serving its purpose, we should be willing to reconsider it.
What would it mean to lead a living system?
If we accept that organizations are interconnected social systems, leadership becomes less about controlling every outcome and more about shaping the conditions in which desirable outcomes can emerge.
This requires a different kind of attention.
Instead of immediately asking who is responsible when something goes wrong, leaders might first examine the conditions that made the outcome likely.
Instead of assuming a communication problem requires more communication, they might explore whether people have access to the information, relationships and decision-making authority they actually need.
Instead of developing a solution in isolation and announcing it to employees, they might involve the people closest to the work in understanding the problem.
This doesn’t mean leaders surrender responsibility.
They remain accountable for direction, decisions, resources and results.
But they recognize that their perspective is necessarily incomplete.
People throughout the organization hold information that leaders may not have access to. They see different parts of the system, experience different constraints and notice different patterns.
Organizational excellence depends, at least in part, on making that collective intelligence available.
It also requires humility.
A leader can make a thoughtful, well-informed decision and still encounter an unexpected outcome.
The important question becomes whether the organization has the capacity to recognize what is happening, learn from it and adjust.
That is a very different standard from expecting every decision to produce exactly the result we anticipated.
Try looking at your organization differently
The next time your leadership team is discussing a persistent organizational challenge, consider resisting the urge to identify a solution immediately.
Instead, spend some time examining the system around the problem.
Ask yourselves:
- What patterns keep repeating? If the same problem returns despite multiple interventions, what might be sustaining it?
- What behaviours are our systems encouraging? Consider performance measures, incentives, approval processes and informal expectations.
- Whose perspective are we missing? Who experiences this problem differently, and what might they know that we don’t?
- What assumptions are we making? Are we treating our interpretation of the problem as an established fact?
- What could we learn through a small experiment? Is there a responsible way to test an alternative before committing to a major change?
These questions won’t eliminate complexity.
But they may help us make better decisions within it.
And sometimes the most useful outcome is discovering that the problem we thought we needed to solve wasn’t quite the problem we actually had.
Excellence isn’t engineered into an organization. It’s cultivated.
Machines perform according to the relationships between their components and the conditions under which they operate.
Organizations also have structures, processes and constraints. But they contain something else: people who learn, interpret, adapt, challenge, collaborate and sometimes surprise us.
We can design a reporting structure.
We cannot design trust into existence.
We can establish a process for sharing information.
We cannot guarantee that people will interpret that information in the same way.
We can create a strategic plan.
We cannot predict every change in the environment, every emerging opportunity or every consequence of the decisions we make.
And that’s not necessarily a problem.
It’s also where creativity, innovation, resilience and collective intelligence come from.
The pursuit of organizational excellence isn’t about eliminating this complexity.
It’s about developing the awareness, relationships, structures and capabilities to work effectively within it.
Perhaps the question we should be asking isn’t how to make our organizations run more like well-oiled machines.
Perhaps it’s how to create environments where people and systems can continually learn, adapt and thrive.
Is your organization working the way you think it is?
If you’ve been trying to solve the same organizational challenges repeatedly, or you’re finding that changes which look sensible on paper aren’t producing the results you expected, it may be worth examining the organization from a different perspective.
At Positivist Group, we work alongside leaders and their teams to understand how strategy, people, culture and organizational systems interact. We don’t begin with a predetermined model or assume that the most visible problem is necessarily the one that needs solving.
We begin by understanding the organization in front of us.
Let’s talk about what’s happening beneath the surface of your organization.
With love,
Erin
