The final perspective is that of culture. Over time the organisation builds up a set of conventions about how things should be done. What behaviour is acceptable. How people should work together. What they should wear. Who should make decisions. Whether it's OK to talk to your boss's boss without permission. Whether it's OK to challenge authority. To take initiative without asking permission. These conventions are almost never written down. They form an invisible maze within the organisation that traps everyone inside. You don’t even know the walls are there until you bump into one and are punished for making a cultural transgression. There may be an official policy that is written down but you can bet that there’s an unofficial convention as well, that’s not written down and will be quite different.

These cultural conventions often form the greatest barrier to change. Because they are invisible, they aren’t addressed during change programs and remain in place, acting to quickly drag the organisation back to old patterns of behaviour or ways of doing things. Many leaders, particularly those who are brought in from outside an organisation to enact change, have been undone when cultural conventions they were not even aware of derailed their change programs. Many leaders are themselves trapped within cultural conventions that were created by leaders long since departed. Many leaders become stuck in execution, no matter how hard they try to delegate, because the culture of the organisation forces all decisions upwards.

Governance is always put in place for a reason. Something needs to be controlled, a check needs to be put in place, a risk needs to be managed. But governance is almost never removed, or changed when the reason for its existence changes. When something changes, old governance structures remain in place and new ones are built on top. I have worked in many organisations where they have introduced a new operating model or new ways of working, which come with various governance mechanisms built in, but rather than replace the existing governance they just add the new ones over the top.

Alignment refers to the way that the organisation is structured. An organisation’s alignment is the path of minimum friction within the organisation - the easiest way to get things done. Traditionally, organisations tended to align themselves around internal concerns - business functions, work phases, resource pools, and so on. These make for efficient delivery of work within a particular domain. The finance team delivers financial reports efficiently, the legal team provides legal advice, the IT teams deliver within their specialty and so on.

Internal alignment is a constraint we impose on organisations to make the job of managing specialised resources easier. It is much easier for a single manager to manage all the data architects, or Java developers or marketing specialists. They all have the same career needs. They do similar work, they have the same skill sets. It's easy to see who outperforms who and should be promoted, and who is underperforming and should be let go. It's easy to manage them as a group. So to make the job of managing people easier, we impose a constraint of internal alignment on the organisation.

Traditionally, leadership in an organisation has followed the industrial model of the machine with the operator in charge up on the control platform. It is concerned with control, decision making and delegation.

In our industrial view of an organisation as a mechanical thing, control is required to ensure that the machine operates as expected. Inputs are within the allowed range and all the parts of the machine are operating at the correct speed to ensure that the whole thing functions correctly. If a part is out of sync, an adjustment can be made to speed up or slow down that part to bring it back within operating parameters. This is traditional management - managing a system or process to ensure that it operates effectively. The systems no longer involve gears or clockwork but the job is the same - adjusting the machine to extract maximum performance while ensuring smooth running.

What holds organisations back from embracing their Evolutionary nature are the constraints we impose on them - constraints of process and culture that tell us we aren’t allowed to do that because either the process or the culture says that we can’t, or that others should be the ones to do it.

These constraints are imposed by us. We build the systems of hierarchy, governance, approvals and the like that prevent organisations from evolving. They do not emerge spontaneously from the organisation. We impose them on the organisation. In our quest to make the organisation behave like the perfect clockwork machine, we impose these constraints on it. In order to force it into the clockwork model, we prevent it from doing what it wants to do naturally - to change and evolve.

Last time we looked at the way we see organisations as mechanical, clockwork structures. The reality is that organisations have never been static, clockwork structures. They have always been dynamic systems, constantly changing and evolving to better meet market needs. What allowed a clockwork model to make sense for so long was that the pace of change was slow enough to keep the cost of change relatively low. Today, as we have seen, the pace of change is increasing. This is making the cost of change more and more significant. No organisation can afford to throw away millions or tens of millions of dollars in lost productivity every year or two in a major re-organisation.

If you ask someone to draw their concept of an organisation, they will often draw some kind of machine, with each team and individual playing the role of a tiny cog in a giant clockwork edifice. Each doing their allotted task to keep the whole machine running smoothly. This mechanical view of the organisation came to us from the factory owners who began the industrial revolution. As we mechanised our work, we also mechanised our view of the way work was done. Those early factory owners looked at the machines that were revolutionising work - the water and wind powered mills, and later the steam engines that powered their factories. They looked at their gears, belts, and pulleys, and saw in them a model for how the work itself could be structured. With themselves as the operator on the platform, working their various levers and valves to send signals to speed up or slow down this or that part of the great machine to keep things running smoothly. The workers - the many cogs and gears of the machine - meshing smoothly together to produce the end products.

Define the right combination of gears and the right systems and processes to manage them and the machine can run smoothly, ticking on forever, efficiently producing whatever it was designed to produce.

The Execution Trap is fairly easy to escape from, but it does require some intentional effort.

The key to escaping from the trap is to deliberately shift conversations or meetings about the detail of work towards a focus on improving the system the work takes place within, or a focus on whether the work is aligned to the organisation’s goals and strategies. We do this by asking the right questions. 

All leaders have three main areas of focus. Setting strategy and direction, leading efforts to improve the way the organisation operates, and dealing with the day to day operations in their area. Whether you are the CEO dealing with organisational strategy, transformation programs and strategic initiatives, or a team lead looking at your strategy for implementing the next project, improved processes and managing a backlog of user stories, all leaders have these three areas of concern.  

One of the most common problems I see facing leaders today is what I call the Execution Trap - leaders who are trapped in a system that diverts all their attention towards operational matters and leaves them no time or mental capacity to deal with their other areas of responsibility.