Companies do not get the results they want: they get the results that their organisational design makes inevitable
Organisations are used to considering behaviour as an expression of the individual. And that is correct: there is free will, personal experience, values, character traits. Yet those who frequent companies regularly observe a recurring phenomenon. People who, outside of work, know how to communicate, collaborate, take responsibility and make decisions, seem to lose many of these skills once they enter the company.
Despite substantial investments in leadership, training and culture, the same problems keep recurring: silos, slow decision-making, information that does not circulate, meetings that multiply without producing choices. Why? The explanation and interventions remain people-centred: insufficient skills, poor motivation, inadequate leadership. These are all relevant answers. But, if we stop here, we often miss the point.
On entering the company, people enter a system of organisational conditions. And organisational systems produce predictable behaviour. Not deterministically, but with sufficient regularity to make certain outcomes highly probable. Decision-making structures, information flows and incentive systems are not neutral elements: they are the operational infrastructure that defines what is possible, what is risky and what, in fact, becomes impracticable. Add to this the unwritten rules, those that make up the actual corporate culture, and the role played by the organisational context appears in full force.
And if the context explains the behaviour, it is the organisational architecture that explains the results.
This is the real discontinuity. In many organisations, collaboration is demanded, but individual performance is rewarded. Information sharing is invited, but access to data is fragmented or hierarchically filtered. Confrontation is encouraged, but the implicit cost of dissent remains high. In these contexts, only consistent responses are observed. Competition emerges where collaboration is penalised. Silence prevails where exposing oneself is risky. Decisions slow down where decision-making power is concentrated on senior roles that act as a bottleneck slowing everything down, despite constant invitations to go faster.
