The Barnacle Problem
Martin's explanation for why strategies fail in organisations that "did everything right", from his revisit of Enabling Management Systems. Management systems accumulate like barnacles on a hull: - Many designers, narrow designs.
Management systems accumulate like barnacles on a hull:
- Many designers, narrow designs. Finance builds a budgeting system, HR a review cycle, IT a security protocol. Each sensible alone; together they signal conflicting priorities to the same people.
- Layering, never uninstalling. New strategies add new systems; old systems are almost never removed. They keep doing their job, motivating the old behaviour, beneath the new direction.
- Invisible drift. Each deviation is small; the alarm only sounds when the company is far off course, when gentle correction is no longer possible (Honing vs Transformation).
Systems motivate behaviour whether or not they were designed to, the crucial insight. A strategy laid over barnacled systems produces beautiful documents nobody acts on.
Remedies: audit before cascade (floor before strategy), and a single accountable integrator, CEO as Chief System Designer. When system signals conflict, Leader Behaviour Is the Signal that wins.
Our synthesis of Roger Martin’s published work, sources credited. Read the originals: they’re excellent.
Reading about method is not the same as running it. We install this system and build the capability that stays.
Turn strategy into executed strategy →