How do organisations keep on keeping on?

Join the discussion on LinkedIn: How do organisations keep on keeping on? When we know how many terrible flaws they have, and we know better theories of leadership, management, adaptation? https://www.linkedin.com/posts/antlerboy_the-bumblebee-staggers-on-anyway-activity-7036970921433198592-zieX

If you spend much time in #TPOLI (This Part Of LinkedIn), you’ll find no shortage of trenchant criticisms of managers, leaders, organisations, bureaucracy, failure to be agile, why we’re doing agile wrong. Yet most organisations carry on regardless.

In the 1950s, Deming talk about ‘zombie companies’, staggering on beyond their natural lifecycle and doomed, like the dinosaurs, to disappear from the face of the earth. And they ain’t gone.

The bumblebee flies anyway… it was always a myth that they ‘shouldn’t’ be able to fly (quite evidently.

· When we know they crush the human spirit, make critical issues undiscussable, constrain discretion and #innovation and human creativity?

· When all their Performance Indicators are about driving towards a goal at any cost, and ensuring that nobody up the #management hierarchy hears anything that would disturb their worldview or quarterly bonuses?

· When they’re rigid, slow, unresponsive to the ‘increasing speed of change in the modern world’, and seem unable to prepare for the #future?

We know there are better theories, better approaches — we test them, we feel it in our experience, and we teach and advocate for them… and yet.

Why are some of the most ‘successful’ organisations those run according to outdated, destructive MBA directions by egotists and sociopaths responding to all ‘the wrong’ incentives?

So who has an appreciative theory of how and why organisations still work as they do?