Seeing organisations as complex social systems highlights governance as a cultural force. Responsibility extends beyond senior leaders to all managers, shaping behaviour through clear standards, accountability, and consistent leadership practice.
Governance allocates authority, responsibility, and decision rights. When it is remote or sealed off from scrutiny, power goes unchecked, accountability erodes, and resource decisions become arbitrary and subjective.
Reframing so-called “negative” people as pragmatists exposes unchecked optimism as a driver of the sunk cost fallacy—loss aversion, ego, and false hope. Drop the Kool-Aid, face reality, and better decisions come into view.
When managers fall into the sunk cost fallacy, more data rarely helps because the problem is emotional, not rational. Biases like ego, loss aversion, and optimism drive persistence. Awareness, governance, and decisive leadership matter more than analysis alone.
Organisations that are above average in their track record of developing leader-managers put an emphasis on creating challenging opportunities, not just for aspiring talent but for incumbent Line Managers who can too easily become stale.
By leveraging the management tool of control to harness the energy released by the leadership tool of motivation, the informal leadership networks that arise can handle the greater demands that result from the organisational change process.
When alignment and planning are conjoined, the process releases untapped potential. This is because a leader-manager is energising people by unlocking feelings of autonomy, competence, and relatedness. An approach that ultimately leads to greater wellness.
By tackling some of the common problems, teams and organisations will be well placed to achieve aspirational efficiency objectives. When this happens, we can get one of those virtuous circles in which the approach sticks and compounds over the years.
This approach yields good, if imperfect, OKRs while advancing real management: pushing teams beyond comfort to learn, improve, and explore—driving meaningful transformation and unlocking organisational value.
No fixed set of actions can define, measure, or achieve success. Thus, trying to make transformation a tick box affair is to setup an organisation for failure. This is because successful transformation is as much about the process as it is about the outcome.
