We’re going to extrapolate the metaphor from my last post and head back to the tidal marsh...
Think about a crew working through tidal channels that sent small boats ahead as scouts. One radios back: the left channel is silting up, so take the right one while there’s still water.
Now imagine the crew can’t turn until every officer at HQ has signed off. By the time they agree, the tide has gone out.
Many organisations steer this way, with cross-functional sign-off, alignment workshops, and unanimous buy-in before anyone moves a lever. Under unanimity, the familiar route often wins by default because it attracts the fewest objections. That’s how organisations drift back into the fjord, and indeed it’s these ‘traditional ways of working’ that really need to be scrutinised…
A wartime manual that reads like your calendar
In 1944, the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA’s wartime predecessor, produced the Simple Sabotage Field Manual. It described how ordinary people in enemy-occupied territory could slow down the organisations they worked in. Among its advice:
do everything through “proper channels”;
refer matters to committees for “further study and consideration”;
make committees as large as possible;
query the wording of minutes; and
question decisions made at the last meeting.
It looks like thoroughness, not sabotage, right!? Well, that’s the warning: nobody needs bad intent to stall an organisation, only a process that treats unanimous approval as the price of moving.
The opposite mistake: The borrowed chart
Skipping agreement altogether isn’t the answer either. I once watched a change program at an organisation whose leaders were good, and who relied heavily on a strong, experienced team. The consultants brought in had done “the same transformation” at a similar organisation, and it showed. They jumped straight to a future state without understanding the current one (in fact, the slide deck positioning the change still had the other organisation’s name in it!). Then a new org. structure, meant to be shared only after consultation, leaked early.
Every answer created three new questions, and the program lost months recovering ground it should never have lost, not because people disagreed, but because the plan was drawn on someone else’s chart. (Read also: ‘The Best Practice Fallacy’)
Same mistake, two directions
Waiting for everyone and ignoring everyone look like opposites. Both skip the same step: reading the water you’re actually in (i.e., neglecting context).
The borrowed chart was reassuring precisely because it made a messy organisation look orderly, but as Dave Snowden argues in The Cynefin Co. Field Guide, complexity can’t be engineered away; you have to work with it. The plan fell apart the moment it met the real organisation, where the relationships and judgment that held the place together never made it into the slide deck.
Alignment sits between the two failures; it means a shared direction, clear boundaries, and listening hard to the people closest to the water, without requiring each of them to approve every turn. Amy Edmondson’s study of 51 work teams found that psychological safety was associated with learning behaviour, such as raising problems and discussing errors. In both failures above, that information never reached the people making the decision.
The so-what: Put the scouts in the budget!
Most capability budgets go through one gate. Everything waits for the same committee and the same full business case, or gets pushed through on a consultant’s confidence. Either way, nothing is tested before it’s committed.
Split the budget instead:
Keep full due diligence for big, hard-to-reverse investments, such as a restructure or an enterprise-wide program.
Ring-fence a small slice of next year’s capability budget for three or four bounded experiments.
Let one named owner approve each within two weeks, provided it has a time limit, stop conditions, and a clear line on what must not be put at risk.
Require evidence within 90 days. What works earns its place in the main budget through normal due diligence. What doesn’t is stopped early and cheaply.
The skills for this can be built and research on creativity training shows that well-designed programs measurably improve creative performance. However, the critical context is that people only keep using those skills if there’s a budget line that enables them.
Then track one number your board has probably never seen: the days between a proposal and its first real test.
Three questions for your leadership team:
Which decisions genuinely need everyone, and which only need someone?
Before our last major change, who read the current state, and did we listen?
How many days does it take us to go from a proposal to its first test?
Where Plexity fits
Plexity sits independently on the buyer’s side, with no training product to sell. Before you commit to a capability investment, I help you read the water you’re actually in, separate the decisions that need full diligence from the ones that need a scout, and design the bounded tests that tell you what works before the big money moves.
From the climbing wall to the rock face: Building capability that holds when the routes aren’t marked.
References
Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999
Office of Strategic Services. (1944, January 17). Simple sabotage field manual (Strategic Services Field Manual No. 3).
Scott, G., Leritz, L. E., & Mumford, M. D. (2004). The effectiveness of creativity training: A quantitative review. Creativity Research Journal, 16(4), 361–388. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15326934crj1604_1
Snowden, D. (2026). The Cynefin Co. field guide: Cynefin in the age of entanglement. The Cynefin Co.