Category: Systems Alignment & Culture

There is a particular form of organizational failure that does not announce itself as failure, because the difficult decision is, in the end, made. It is simply made later, and made through a harder process than the timely course would have required. I want to examine this pattern, because it is both common and instructive, and because it reveals something about the ethics of avoidance that the more dramatic failures tend to obscure. The decision that is deferred is not thereby avoided. It is merely surrendered to worse conditions.

Consider the following case. A consultant is engaged by an organization to undertake culture development work. The consultant arrives, in the course of that work, at a set of recommendations, among them — and this is the consequential one — the recommendation that a longstanding leader be transitioned out of the role. The recommendation is not made lightly, nor is it made in isolation; it emerges from the diagnostic work the organization itself commissioned. The consultant is careful, moreover, to name the limits of that work, stating plainly that they had not conducted an investigation, and that their recommendation rested on the patterns their culture work had surfaced rather than on a formal inquiry. The board, however, is not pleased. The recommendation is unwelcome, as recommendations of this kind nearly always are, and rather than engage the substance of it, the board dismisses the consultant. The matter, for a time, is closed. Some months later, after a separate and investigative process, the same transition that the consultant had recommended is carried out — arrived at by a different road, and later, than the one the consultant had offered.

What is worth understanding about this sequence is that the board’s initial response was not, in fact, a decision to keep the leader. It was a decision to defer the decision, and deferral carries costs that accrue precisely because they are invisible at the moment of deferral. The board experienced the dismissal of the consultant as the resolution of a problem; in reality it was the postponement of a problem under deteriorating terms. Shapiro and Gross (2008) describe the conditions in which organizations confront moral dilemmas as occasions of turbulence, and they distinguish degrees of it — the moderate turbulence that demands focused attention, the severe turbulence that attends a genuine moral dilemma and requires new approaches to navigate. The recommendation to transition a longstanding leader is severe turbulence by this measure: it is a dilemma, freighted with relationship and history and the discomfort of acting against someone who has given the organization years. The board’s instinct was to reduce the turbulence by removing its apparent source — the consultant who had named the dilemma. Naming a dilemma is not the same as creating it, however, and the removal of the messenger did nothing to the underlying condition, which continued to develop in the months that followed until it could no longer be deferred at all.

There is a further possibility worth holding here, and it is the one that gives the case its sting. The consultant had not investigated; the later process did. It is therefore plausible — and I would put it no more strongly than plausibly, since the case does not disclose its own inner workings — that the investigation which finally arrived grew out of the very concerns the consultant had raised. If that reading is right, then the board did not reject the message so much as it rejected the messenger, retaining the concern while dismissing the person who delivered it, and acting later, through a separate inquiry, on the very matter it had declined to consider when it was first and more gently laid before them. The avoidance, on that reading, did not even spare the board its reckoning. It merely delayed the reckoning and altered the road by which it came.

There is a useful distinction, drawn from the work on transformative mediation by Bush and Folger (1994), between addressing the issue and addressing the relationship, and the case turns in part on a confusion between the two. The board, I suspect, experienced the consultant’s recommendation as a threat to a relationship — to the standing of a leader who had been part of the organization’s life for a long time — and responded to protect that relationship. The recommendation was, in its substance, about an issue: whether the organization’s structure and leadership were serving its mission. The board preserved the relationship in the short term at the cost of the issue, by treating an issue-question as a relationship-threat, which is to say at the cost of the very thing it had paid the consultant to examine. The irony, which is really a tragedy of sequence, is that the relationship was not ultimately preserved either. The transition occurred regardless, only later and by a harder route, so that the leader who might have been transitioned through a careful and deliberate process was instead transitioned through an investigative one. The avoidance purchased neither the issue nor the relationship. It purchased only delay, and delay at a premium.

I find myself returning, in cases of this kind, to a question I am not able to resolve cleanly: whether the avoidance is a failure of courage or a failure of structure, and whether the distinction finally matters. It is tempting to locate the fault in the board’s unwillingness to act on an unwelcome recommendation — to call it, simply, a failure of nerve. I am wary, however, of explanations that reduce systemic outcomes to individual character, because they tend to be both unfair and unhelpful. The more searching account, I think, is that the organization lacked a structure through which a severe dilemma could be engaged rather than evaded — a process by which an unwelcome recommendation could be weighed on its merits, the discomfort it generated contained rather than displaced onto the person who delivered it, and a decision reached deliberately while deliberation was still possible. The board did what organizations without such structures reliably do, in the absence of such a structure: it discharged the discomfort by removing its proximate source and mistook the relief for resolution. Whether or not the individual members of the board possessed courage is, on this account, somewhat beside the point. They were operating without the architecture that would have allowed courage to express itself as a sound process.

The lesson I would draw is that avoidance is not a neutral act of waiting. It is a decision with a cost structure of its own, and the cost compounds over the interval of deferral, because the conditions under which the deferred decision must eventually be made are almost always worse than the conditions under which it was first declined. The hard recommendation, carefully arrived at, is a gift to an organization, however unwelcome it feels in the moment of its delivery — for it offers the chance to act while care is still possible. To dismiss it is not to escape the decision. It is to guarantee that the decision, when it comes, will come by a harder road. Balance, here as elsewhere, is not the avoidance of difficulty but the capacity to engage difficulty while engagement can still be principled. The recommendation deferred is the recommendation made harder, and the organization that defers it pays twice — once in the delay, and once again in the road it must finally take.