Organizations rarely lose contact with reality in one dramatic moment. The separation usually begins while the institution is still functioning, customers are still buying, reports are still being produced, and leaders still appear to be in control.
 |
| Click to Enlarge |
A weak signal is explained away. An uncomfortable pattern is treated as temporary. A trusted assumption survives one more planning cycle. Each decision may appear reasonable in isolation, yet together they allow a widening distance to form between the organization’s internal picture and the conditions outside it.
That distance is drift.
Drift is especially dangerous during transitions because the old system does not disappear when the new one begins to emerge. Established products may still sell. Familiar expertise may still produce results. Institutional authority may remain intact. The evidence of change appears beside evidence of continuity, giving leaders plausible reasons to delay revising their interpretation.
Foresight often fails in this interval not because leaders have no information, but because the organization cannot grant disruptive information enough meaning to change its course.
Success Can Create Blindness
Success teaches organizations what to notice.
Leaders learn which customers matter, which measures predict performance, which capabilities create advantage, and which problems deserve attention. These lessons become embedded in budgets, incentives, reporting systems, hiring practices, and professional identities.
For a time, this accumulated knowledge creates strength. The organization becomes faster and more confident because it no longer has to reconsider every assumption. Experience narrows the field to what has historically mattered.
The danger appears when the environment changes faster than the institution’s interpretive system. Measures that once revealed reality begin concealing it. Expertise becomes attached to a declining model. Customers who represent the current business dominate attention while emerging customers remain statistically unimportant.
Success then becomes a filter. The organization sees the future mainly through the conditions that produced its past.
This is why strong performance can coexist with growing strategic danger. Results describe what the existing system is still producing. They do not necessarily reveal whether the system remains aligned with what is emerging.
*I use AI in all my work.
************************************************************************
Kevin Benedict
Futurist, and Lecturer at TCS
View my profile on LinkedIn
Follow me on X @krbenedict
Join the Linkedin Group Digital Intelligence
***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.
No comments:
Post a Comment