Polluting the Organisational Ecosystem
Beware legacy "support" industries perpetuating outdated mindsets, attitudes, and behaviours
“Mort came at last to the river Ankh, greatest of rivers. Even before it entered the city, it was slow and heavy with the silt of the plains, and by the time it got to The Shades even an agnostic could have walked across it. It was hard to drown in the Ankh, but easy to suffocate.” — Terry Pratchett 1
When Jim Collins and Jerry Porras wrote their bestseller “Built to Last” in the early 1990’s, the title reflected the widespread belief that successful organisations endure over many decades. 2
Silicon Valley evolved a different perspective.
The Valley’s extended ecosystem is home to technology incubators, accelerators, mentors, angels, venture funds, IP specialists, banks, investors, scientists, technologists, engineers, mathematicians, and universities.
All of these act and interact by cycling and recycling money, experience, insights, and people through startups, IPOs, M&As, etc.
This results in the continuous creation, reconfiguration, and reshaping of the organisational landscape.
In this context, “success” is not so much focused on creating a single enduring organisation but on active participation in a thriving, evolving ecosystem.
By embracing this outlook, technology giants like Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon rose to the top of the economic pile, with a current combined market capitalisation of more than $7 Trillion between them.
When we describe organisations as participating in ecosystems, we’re pointing to the notion that organisations are themselves living entities — a perspective that shouldn’t really be that surprising, given that organisations are in fact full of living human beings.
But ever since the Industrial Revolution, organisations have seen people less as human beings and more as “human resources” — performing predefined roles as readily replaceable cogs in the organisational machine.
Ecosystem language may be on the rise, but the deeply embedded habitual attitudes of industrial organisations are hard to shift.
What makes these habits especially hard to break is the ways in which they’re regularly reinforced by a host of industries that emerged and evolved to support the old industrial order.
A central example is the Human Resources industry, which originally came into being because organisations didn’t actually want whole human beings — they wanted “hands”.
But hands inevitably come attached to humans, so HR emerged and evolved to handle the messy human aspects of employees that otherwise got in the way of their ability to perform their specified job functions as efficiently as the organisational machine required.
Closely allied to HR is Training & Development — rebadged Learning & Development (L&D) in the wake of the organisational learning movement of the 1990’s. 3
The L&D industry features a multiplicity of providers, varying from large organisations, through boutiques, and myriad freelance trainers, coaches, facilitators, etc.
Then there’s a whole swathe of certification bodies, institutes, and federations dispensing HR and L&D diplomas, titles & badges in return for subscriptions, supervision and recertification fees.
”Supporting” all this is a humungous and ever-growing HR software industry — providing platforms, services, apps, and dashboards for payroll, benefits, shared services, and employee monitoring and “performance management solutions". 4
As well as this extended HR industry, there's the global business school industry churning out thousands of MBAs per year, where students pay fat tuition fees to fast track their careers into senior roles with big hats and big bucks.
And, last but by no means least, there's the $900 billion management consulting industry 5 whose continued existence is wholly dependent on keeping senior executives trapped in roles that constrain decision making, stifle, smother, and strangle innovation, agility, and adaptiveness and keep the never-ending gravy train of dependency chugging along. 6
These industries grew to support mindsets, attitudes, and behaviours that were central to the operation of organisations as machines.
And, just as traditional industrial organisations continue to pollute the ecosystems in which they operate — with dramatic and disastrous effects on the environment — traditional support industries continue to pollute emergent organisational ecosystems by perpetuating toxic mindsets, attitudes, and behaviours. 7
It's almost impossible for people in these support industries to see how their well-meaning efforts thwart emergence of thriving organisational ecosystems.
As Upton Sinclair famously observed: “It's difficult to get someone to understand something when their salary depends on them not understanding it”.
So, what can you do instead?
Firstly, stop relying on any external “support” that fails to genuinely build the capacity of your own people to create a thriving future-fit culture.
Secondly, be alert to the language of traditional thinking polluting the organisation, such as: leaders as opposed to leadership; values as a synonym for cultural glue; culture assumed to be singular, homogenous, and uncontested; agile assumed to be synonymous with agility; and magical panaceas such as holocracy, teal, psychological safety, etc.
(BTW — There’s nothing wrong with psychological safety as a concept. It’s just that it can’t be sprinkled like pixie dust on top of a dysfunctional organisation. Psychological safety is an emergent property of a systemic culture of learning). 8
Thirdly, focus fully on enabling sense making, decision making & action taking to become ever more tightly coupled, rapidly and repeatedly iterated, deeply embedded, and widely distributed throughout the organisation. 9
Fourthly, be very wary of anyone peddling an off-the-shelf so-called “best-practice solution”.
Fifth and finally, stay well clear of anyone whose “help” will perpetuate the poisonous habit of a few folks in big hats hogging organisational decision making. 10
Questions for reflection
Which “support” functions in your organisation perpetuate outdated mindsets, attitudes, and behaviours from the industrial era?
Where does you organisation rely on external “help” that inadvertently reinforces the traditional mindsets, attitudes, and behaviours of the past?
How are you ensuring that efforts to create a future-fit organisation aren’t being undermined, stifled, and polluted by toxic legacy mindsets, attitudes, and behaviours?
In our more cynical moments, those of us who were involved in the organisational learning movement back in the 1990s point out that the only lasting visible impact was that Training & Development got rebadged Learning & Development.
“Managing performance” of remote workers via digital monitoring and surveillance technologies became a big issue during the pandemic. The 2021 EU report Electronic Monitoring and Surveillance in the Workplace concluded that these practices “raise a variety of ethical issues”. You can download the report here.
According to Berkshire Hathaway’s BusinessWire the global consulting industry was worth $895Bn in 2021.
For more on the codependent relationship between old-school senior executives and senior partners in big consulting firms, see The Five Fatal Habits pages 14-16.
There are few more toxic examples than the notion that an organisation’s cultural glue is its supposedly “shared values”.
For more details, see the earlier article “Seeing Culture”.
For more on the problem of senior executives seeing their role as “decision makers” see this earlier piece on “Senior executives must give up their decision rights”.