The Machine We Built: Why Organisations Don’t Behave Like Our Plans : metaphors that run our organisations I

Why organisations keep behaving differently from the plan

Picture a meeting most programme managers have sat through.

A boardroom. A delivery plan on the screen. Milestones arranged into a tidy timeline. Risks colour coded. Dependencies mapped. Governance routes agreed. The whole thing looks orderly enough to be reassuring.

Someone asks the obvious question.

Are we on track?

The programme manager hesitates.

Not because the plan is wrong. The plan may be very good. The governance may be sound. The delivery team may be competent. The highlight report may be honest.

And yet something is off.

One department is quietly resisting a process change. Another has interpreted the policy differently. Legal advice has introduced a constraint that was not visible when the route was agreed. A supplier has followed the specification exactly and somehow produced something nobody quite wanted. A senior sponsor remains supportive, but their attention has moved elsewhere. A service manager says they understand the change, but their team’s behaviour suggests they have understood it in a very different way.

Nothing has technically failed.

The machine is still running.

But progress feels slower, heavier and more uncertain than the plan suggests it should be.

If you work in change delivery, this moment is familiar. The machinery of governance is doing what it was designed to do. The boards are meeting. The risks are logged. The decisions are recorded. The project remains visible.

Yet the organisation is behaving in ways the machinery struggles to predict.

Why?

Nearly forty years ago, the organisational theorist Gareth Morgan offered a deceptively simple answer in Images of Organization.

We understand organisations through metaphors.

Often without noticing.

One metaphor in particular has shaped modern management more than any other: the organisation as a machine.

The machine we built

Once you notice the machine metaphor, it appears everywhere.

Processes are designed like mechanisms.
Plans break work into components.
Governance introduces control points.
Roles are allocated.
Inputs are assembled.
Outputs are expected.

The basic idea is comforting: if we design the right process, put the right parts in the right order and apply the right controls, the intended outcome should follow.

In many situations, this is not only useful. It is essential.

Payroll systems need to behave like machines.
Waste collection schedules need to behave like machines.
Financial controls need to behave like machines.
Procurement processes, audit trails and statutory returns all need a level of reliability that depends on repeatable process.

Nobody wants a beautifully organic payroll system that adapts unpredictably to its environment.

So the machine metaphor has real value. It gives us structure, consistency and control. It helps large organisations do complicated things without relying entirely on memory, personality or improvisation.

Modern public sector governance reflects this mindset.

Stage gates. Programme boards. Risk registers. Procurement frameworks. Approval routes. Benefits plans. Audit trails.

These are not foolish inventions. They are part of how organisations create accountability. They help us see where decisions were made, what was agreed and who was responsible.

And to be fair, often they work.

But anyone who has delivered a complex programme knows the uncomfortable truth.

The organisation is never just a machine.

When the machine meets reality

Consider what actually slows programmes down.

It is rarely the Gantt chart itself.

The friction usually appears somewhere else.

A stakeholder group interprets the change differently from the project team.
A department’s priorities shift halfway through delivery.
A technically sensible process cuts across professional identity.
A policy objective collides with operational reality.
A supplier delivers the thing that was specified, not the thing that was meant.
A team says it has capacity, but only because nobody has yet asked what else is landing at the same time.

These are not simple mechanical failures.

They are human, cultural and political dynamics.

The machine metaphor is brilliant at describing process. It is much weaker at describing interpretation.

And interpretation is often where change either succeeds or stalls.

A new system is not only a new system. It is a change in confidence, habits, status, workload and local meaning. A new process is not only a cleaner workflow. It may feel to one team like improvement, to another like surveillance and to another like the loss of professional judgement.

The plan may describe the formal change.

The organisation has to live through the interpreted change.

Those are not always the same thing.

The hidden assumption in governance

Once you start looking for it, the machine metaphor becomes hard to unsee.

A lot of programme governance carries a quiet assumption:

If we define the right process, delivery will follow.

That assumption is not stupid. It is often necessary. Without it, delivery would collapse into improvisation.

But experienced leaders know something else is happening too.

People do not simply receive change and act on it. They interpret it first.

They ask, often silently:

Do I understand this?
Can I do it?
Do I want to support it?
Do I have the capacity for it?
What does this mean for my team, my work, my judgement, my status, my residents or my service?

Only after those questions are answered does behaviour start to shift.

This is why a project can be well governed and still feel stuck.

The machine is asking, “Has the process been followed?”

The organisation is asking, “What does this change mean for us?”

Both questions matter. But they are not the same question.

If governance only hears the first, it may miss the second until resistance has already become behaviour.

Why this still matters

Morgan’s central insight was not that organisations are machines.

It was that the metaphor we choose determines what we notice.

If we see the organisation as a machine, we focus on process design, efficiency, control and optimisation. Those are valuable capabilities. In public services, they are often essential.

But every metaphor hides as much as it reveals.

The machine metaphor helps us see the formal system. It helps us ask whether the process is clear, whether roles are defined, whether decisions have been made and whether controls are in place.

It is less good at showing us meaning, anxiety, identity, trust, informal power and adaptation.

So when a programme starts to behave unpredictably, the answer is not always to tighten the machine.

Sometimes the answer is to change the lens.

Perhaps the organisation is behaving less like a machine and more like a living organism trying to survive in a changing environment.

Perhaps it is behaving like a culture negotiating shared meaning.

Perhaps it is behaving like a political system balancing competing interests.

Each metaphor reveals something the machine cannot.

The danger is not using the machine metaphor.

The danger is forgetting that it is a metaphor.

The practical question

For leaders and programme managers, the most useful question may not be:

What is wrong with the plan?

At least, not at first.

The better question may be:

What metaphor am I using to understand this organisation right now?

Because the answer shapes what we notice.

If I think the organisation is a machine, I will look for broken parts, missing controls and inefficient processes.

If I think it is an organism, I will look for adaptation, capacity and survival pressures.

If I think it is a culture, I will look for meaning, rituals, stories and identity.

If I think it is a political system, I will look for interests, power, negotiation and conflict.

None of these lenses gives the whole truth. But each one may show us something the others miss.

That matters because change delivery fails when we mistake one lens for reality.

A plan can be good and still be incomplete.
A process can be clear and still be resisted.
A governance route can be sound and still miss the thing that is really happening.
A project can be on track in the machinery and off track in the organisation.

That is why metaphor matters.

Not because it gives us clever language, but because it changes what we are capable of seeing.

In the next article, I want to shift the lens.

If the organisation is not only a machine, perhaps it is something else as well.

Perhaps it is closer to a living organism, trying to survive, adapt and breathe in a changing environment.

Part II: When organisations start to breathe.