What this newsletter is about

Inaugural Edition

Organizations are full of capable, well-intentioned people. The workplace remains one of society's most vital institutions, providing not just a livelihood but a sense of shared purpose, and the structure to solve complex problems together.

So why is it that the outcomes organizations produce are so often ones nobody intended and nobody wants? Budgets that don't reflect strategy. Teams that don't collaborate despite being told to. Leaders who know exactly what's wrong and can't fix it. Commitments made in good faith and quietly abandoned.

The standard explanation reaches for the nearest person. Someone isn't stepping up. A team is siloed. Leadership isn't aligned. We need to cut costs. And sometimes, that's true. But it's rarely the whole story, and acting on it rarely solves the problem. New people, less people, same outcomes.

This newsletter is about what the standard explanation leaves out: the structural forces that make certain behaviors not just likely but predictable regardless of who's in the room. And about what becomes possible once you can see those forces clearly — including the kinds of changes that actually hold.

An organization is a human activity system

A system is a set of interacting elements (people, roles, processes, incentives, information flows) operating under shared rules and constraints to produce outcomes that none of its parts could produce alone. You cannot predict how an organization will behave by studying its members in isolation. And you cannot fully explain how a member behaves without also examining how their behavior is shaped by systemic forces.

This matters because the behaviors you observe inside an organization — the politics, the workarounds, the unspoken rules — are not simply the sum of individual choices. They are emergent properties of the structural conditions people are operating in. These emergent properties arise from the interaction between the structure and the people inside it, and they will reliably reappear as long as those conditions remain unchanged.

The reason why the same intervention produces different results in different organizations is that individual dispositions interact with structural conditions in ways that are probabilistic rather than mechanistic. The structure shapes what behaviors are likely, but it does not determine what any individual will do.

What this looks like in practice

Take accountability as an example
One of the most common complaints in organizational life is that people aren't holding themselves accountable, commitments are diffuse, and no one owns outcomes. The standard diagnosis is cultural. The standard intervention is a workshop.

But look at the structure. In most organizations, accountability and authority are misaligned. People are held responsible for outcomes they don't have the authority to produce. A manager accountable for team performance who can't control hiring, compensation, or resource allocation. A project lead responsible for delivery with no authority over the people doing the work. Under those conditions, accountability doesn't fail because people lack commitment. It fails because the structure makes genuine accountability impossible.

Here's what makes this particularly interesting: often, people know the system is broken. The misalignment isn't invisible to those living inside it. But knowing the system is broken doesn't automatically produce the capacity — or the political will — to fix it. Why that gap exists, and what it would take to close it, is one of the recurring questions this newsletter will examine.

What to expect

Each edition will take one pattern of organizational behavior that looks irrational or dysfunctional on the surface and examine what it looks like once you can see the underlying structural forces. Some editions will go deeper on a single dynamic. Others will connect patterns that don't obviously belong together.

A note on perspective

This newsletter is analytical, not prescriptive. It honors a messy truth: organizations are incredibly hard to run, and most structural failures aren't the result of bad intentions.

But structures aren't neutral, either. They distribute burden, opportunity, and risk unevenly. When a system consistently constrains people or forces those with the least power to bear the highest cost, we need to name that plainly—not just diagnose it clinically.

My goal is to map these workplace patterns objectively. What makes a reasonable degree of objectivity possible is that certain fundamental rules apply no matter your culture or management philosophy. For example, if you hold someone accountable for a result but deny them the authority and resources they need to achieve it, you are going to have a problem. Your feelings about power or your beliefs about leading through 'influence' cannot override this structural reality.

That principle is our foundation. It applies whether you are running a scrappy startup or a massive multinational, and whether your leadership style is collaborative or hierarchical.

The objective of the newsletter is not to propose a solution for every problem. It is to cultivate a perspective that makes understanding reality in the workplace easier.

Alexander Spradling, PhD, is an organizational consultant and executive coach based in Austin, Texas. He writes Why Organizations Misbehave.