Why do we find ourselves here, in this "bad" place? Failing to innovate, standards slipping? Sorry, your organisation is destined to doom!

As scholar of innovation and change and as a leader of a change and technology agency and charity, I've spent the last 21 years immersed in the subject of disruptive innovation, organisational demise, culture change and "business turn around".? I've done my "10,000 hours" (and more) and amassed data alongside deep lived experience - whether working on academic research projects, reading the literature, or helping to intervene as a consultant.

I'm clear that a short 'post' or even a huge volume of papers will never truly do justice to the issues in these spaces, there is simply so much to discuss and explore and knowledge is ever growing and changing. And, for too long, I've used this as an excuse to not pen down my learning.

Nevertheless, I feel compelled to share brief reflection on a growing trend: people seeking to answer the question "why do we find ourselves here, in this "bad" place?". Especially people seeking to place blame at the feet of specific individuals or specific systems.

Ultimately, it's our people in every corner of our organisations that create the culture and the performance that we're willing to accept. The slow, often unconscious erosion of shared rules, leads to the slow, often unconscious erosion of standards and the development of new, acceptable behaviour as the real norms, rules and culture at work.

I argue there are no "people to blame", and no "bad people", even in environments where bad behaviour has gone unchecked. Complex systems, made from lots of individuals are destined to fall from grace over time... but it needn't be this way.

We don't work in machines.

The first distinction that's worth offering here is that organisations work much more like organisms than machines, so a lens know as "complex adaptive systems" is a good place to start to ponder this question.

What we quickly learn from this perspective is that machines can be complicated, but we can break them down to determine causes and effects to problems that arise. Organisations however, like organisms, are genuinely complex, so we find a myriad of interrelated issues with no straight lines of causation.

Are we failing to innovate or letting standards slip or both?

Next, it's worth unpicking weather the organisations we're considering are:

• getting "disrupted" by other competitive organisations, or
• failing to maintain standards, in effect disrupting themselves, or
• both the above.

All three contexts can be viewed as "wicked problems" (in the truest definition of this term). However, the balance of conclusions from research and evidence teaches us different lessons for each context.

Getting "disrupted"?

For the organisations being disrupted by competitors, I've observed that research and practice gravitates around both conscious and unconscious "routine rigidities" and "resource rigidities", which trap and eventually strangle organisations.? In these contexts, all too often, leadership teams get blindsided by transformational ideas from outside their organisations or are blind to such ideas from within their organisations.

We learn here that their resource allocation approaches and their processes to respond to signals of change are fixated on maintaining, improving, optimising, gripping, controlling or competing with a "long-term foe".

Eventually, what these organisations offer starts to lack alignment with what people really need, and new often simpler concepts emerge, which are "good enough". Worse still, these alternative concepts, products or services usually look and feel "less sophisticated" to the people who have spent much of their carers working hard within the current dominant model or status quo.

As a consequence, "organisational DNA" - the collective ingrained behaviour and systems across an organisation - creates a mass of internal antibodies to the consideration of transformative alternatives to "what we do", let alone the desire to invest real time and cash. This unfolding of events is often referred to as the "innovators dilemma":

• Do we focus on improving what we do or do we spend some time doing new things?
• Do we try both?
• And, if we dare do both, what balance do we need - can we manage this in an ambidextrous way?

The perpetual failure by organisational leaders to respond to "disruptive opportunities" from within or attacks from external "disruptive innovations", therefore lies in a complex web of habit, incentives, process and understanding of how economies evolve.

Let's consider an old-school example. Through this understanding, we see that Polaroid's failure to embrace digital camera technology (despite having an in-house team who were at the forefront of this movement), cannot be laid at the feet of its exec, or its engineers or its board or its most vocal and demanding customers, who were asking for product improvements, not lower quality digital images, as they were seen at the time. Instead, we can see that a complex multifaceted combination of factors led Polaroid and a heap of its mainstream competition to leap off the cliff to bankruptcy at the same time, in a mutual denial of the broader technological change which was afoot. Naturally, we can learn from these events and insights, but more on this later.

Slipping standards?

For organisations that appear to undermine and disrupt themselves, through what looks like a gradual erosion of standards, I've observed research and practice gravitate around the brutally complex combination of a host of factors, three really standout:

1. the natural entropy that occurs in people's buy-in to organisational and behavioural "rules",
2. people's personal standards/values shifting, and
3. external pressures that impact either or both of these conditions.

?One of the key features of complex adaptive systems is that each of the significant parts of the system share a common understanding of the "rules" that govern "choices" about to where to place attention and how we respond to what's attended to.

Scientists have shown, for example, that flocks of geese achieve the complex goal of migrating around the world using five, shared basic rules. Flocks of geese have no lead goose, no goose project plans, no goose logistical controls and the like. They have their instincts, which act as "shared rules" that set out a shared sense of motivation, destination and required behavioural standards.

The shared rules between geese govern their choices in the micro second-by-second moment, and over the longer-term.? A failure to follow these rules usually leads the flock, or individuals within it, to their doom.

Organisations, like all complex systems, need shared rules too.

However, unlike our geese the people within organisations don't have an instinctive set of shared rules to help govern their individual choices in the moment, nor their collective action over the longer term. Instead, people need to come together to form and agree "shared rules" that determine:

1. where we're going - we can think of this as our shared purpose, vision and mission,
2. the goals and feedback we monitor - to get a sense of if we're heading in the right direction - we can think of this as our shared objectives, our key desired results, our most essential key performance indicators, and
3. how we treat each other on our shared journey - a shared agreement of the behaviours we ought to expect (and not tolerate) wrapped up in a frame of shared values or agreed minimum professional standards.

My reading of research and practice is clear. Leaders who do a better job of involving their people in co-creating these “shared rules" for their organisations have a better chance of:

• people understanding and buying-in to shared rules, and
• embedding and "living these rules", consistently across their organisations.

Doing so means a better chance of everyone pulling in the same direction, to maintain and uphold standards in pursuit of clear goals and an inspiring destination. Ultimately, co-creating shared rules means leaders have a better chance of their people doing the "right thing" when no-one is watching.

Organisational success, therefore, needs people to be deeply aligned to shared rules. This places a huge responsibility on:

• internally-facing "people functions", including managerial and leadership roles, and
• externally-facing customer and partnering roles.

It means every touch point with colleagues, customers and partners, present, past and future, needs to be designed and aligned with the desired organisational rules in mind - it's values and its vision. From how an organisation hires, admires, inspires and retires (or fires) it's people, selects and serves is customers, and partners with other actors. It's critical for managers and leaders, at all levels, to consistently role model and uphold being vision- and values-led. This means holding themselves and others to account, in the moment, and making it easy for those they lead to take personal responsibility for doing the same too.

How does this relate to standards? I promise I'm getting there. The problem is that as time moves on, people naturally leave and new people join, and the collective memory of agreeing shared rules diminishes within organisations. Less people pull in the same direction, less people are holding standards where they once were. Moreover, individuals' personal "rules" - their personal values and goals - might not always entirely align with those of their employers, worse still they might even clash.

Co-creating shared rules: the power of the collective?

Unlike our flocks of geese with their instinctive shared rules, complex systems of people face the very real problem that the buy-in to shared beliefs, or efficacy of shared rules, naturally erodes over time.

This is why all organisations need to regularly refresh or reactivate their "organisational strategies", and, better still, they need to do this collectively, in a way that delivers:

• tangible strategy documents that typically hold all these shared rules together in one space, and
• strategy as a leadership tool at a personal, team, divisional and organisational-level.

Importantly, organisations should undertake their collective approach to "re-agreeing" or "reactivating" their shared rules before a collective erosion of shared values (and agreed behavioural expectations) and vision (alignment to shared goals), eats away at the standards and activities that an organisation ought to be upholding.

The sad reality is that most leaders and most employees don't yet see the links between strategy and culture, in the way that's described above.

All too often terms like strategy, purpose, vision, mission, goals, values and behavioural expectations are met with eye rolls from skeptical staff, or marketing and communications colleagues who seem more concerned with the external perceptions of these vital collective agreements, than their real impact on working conditions, behaviours or standards.

Worse still, in an environment where people feel less connected to shared rules there is a natural human tendency as performance pressures increase (from competition, regulation or funding) to either follow:

• the easy path to popular outcomes by cutting corners, or
• the strongest most dominant incentives and people.

In this complex condition, we see standards slipping - either performance standards, in terms of quality, or behavioural standards, in terms of personal compassion, civility or integrity (especially when seeking to hit what feel like more pressing performance targets).

Either way, "norms" shift in organisations and not in a good way.

Ultimately, it's our people in every corner of our organisations that create the culture and the performance that we're willing to accept. The slow, often unconscious erosion of shared rules, leads to the slow, often unconscious erosion of standards and the development of new, acceptable behaviour as the real norms, rules and culture at work.

So, in short, there are no "people to blame", no "bad people", even in environments where bad behaviour has gone unchecked. Complex systems, made from lots of individuals are destined to fall from grace over time.? Moreover, anyone putting forward or seeking cause and effect answers to the question of why standards have dropped, or pointing fingers of blame, are also part of the problem.

If this is the case, the obvious question is: what can we do in the face of drivers that interrelate and inevitably lead organisations to face disruption or a slipping of standards?

The answers to this question are all around us, alas, I don't have time today to share more reflections (and I bet you don't have much more time to read), so I'll write again one day soon on how we must:

1. co-create collective responsibility,
2. take time for truth and reconciliation,
3. undertake collective reboots and refreshing of shared rules,
4. deploy systems of rapid accountability,
5. introduce approaches to collectively course correct when things don't work.
6. avoid the temptation of simplistic assertions of blame, and
7. place deep empathy as the central driver of improvement and innovation.

All of this depends upon people being given the space the speak-up and leaders being brave enough to truly listen-up (to hear and respond). Like I said at the top of this post, no short paper can do the complexities of these subjects real justice. So I hope you forgive my sweeping statements. I do hope, however, I've shared some food for thought for the next time someone asks you, "just how did we get here?". Especially when they're secretly seeking to pin the blame somewhere other than themselves. Remember, typically, where we are has happened on their watch, too.

Resonate?