when you think you might be missing something.
Are you leading a second organisation, more powerful than the one you can see?
Maybe you built it. Maybe you stepped into it. One way or another, here you are.
It’s the attitudes and values, the patterns of speech and thinking, shaped by a thousand sticks and carrots into an unconscious field of intelligence running across the people of the organisation.
It’s your corporate common sense.
It decides what can and can’t be done, and how.
Not by explicit order, but by the implicit order, the silent agreements encoded into it.
Any project involving activities beyond the bounds of that common sense can stall or drift, as people bend their priorities away from it for reasons that don’t quite explain themselves.
You can fit a team into a framework and hold them to it.
Or you can let them ride the gradients already written into their common sense, and watch them hold themselves in alignment.
But you can’t reshape a common sense you can’t yet see. So step one is learning to read the imprints of the one you already have.
Part of you suspects this is another management fad.
Another part of you knows exactly what is being described.
There is only one way to tell them apart.