When Organisations Start to Breathe: The Limits of Control in Change Delivery: Metaphors that run our organisations II

Why plans drift when the environment changes

The plan still looks good.

Better, if we are honest. Cleaner milestones. More precise dependencies. Risks that feel understood. Governance points arranged with the sort of confidence that reassures a board.

And yet, if we are paying attention, something has shifted.

Not in the plan.

In the environment around it.

A policy moves. A supplier changes direction. A neighbouring authority takes a different stance. A senior sponsor’s attention bends towards another pressure. A service starts absorbing a new demand that never quite appears in the RAID log. A team still says it has capacity, but only because nobody has asked what else is landing at the same time.

Nothing has failed.

But the system feels alive.

That is the moment where we have to admit something uncomfortable.

We did not build a machine.

Or at least, we did not build only a machine.

We are working with something closer to an organism.

We designed a machine. We got a living system.

In the first piece, I explored how much of our governance still assumes the organisation behaves like a machine. That was not meant as a criticism. It is how most of us have been trained to think about delivery.

Break the work down.
Define the process.
Assign the owner.
Set the milestone.
Monitor the risk.
Report the exception.
Move to the next stage.

There is real value in that. Without structure, complex organisations become noise.

Gareth Morgan captured this neatly in Images of Organization. The machine metaphor dominates because it works, until it does not.

But Morgan offers another lens that often feels closer to what we actually experience in delivery.

The organisation as organism.

Not simply assembled, but evolving.
Not merely controlled, but adapting.
Not separate from its environment, but constantly shaped by it.

Once you see that, it becomes difficult to unsee.

The board paper may describe a machine. The lived organisation behaves more like a living system.

We have been here before

There is something familiar about this if we step back.

In some of my earlier writing on AI and change, I argued that AI is not only disrupting organisations. It is revealing how they already work: informally, adaptively and often invisibly.

This is similar.

The organism is not new. It was always there.

We often chose to describe it as a machine because machines are easier to govern. They give us cleaner language. They fit into reporting cycles. They have parts, controls and failure points. They let us imagine that if the right lever is pulled, the right movement will follow.

An organism is less comforting.

It responds to context. It conserves energy. It protects itself. It adapts around constraints. It learns from pain. It sometimes resists not because it is broken, but because it is trying to survive.

That does not fit as neatly into a highlight report.

But it may explain more of what actually happens.

Survival first. Strategy later.

This is where the metaphor becomes practical rather than decorative.

If we treat the organisation as an organism, behaviour that looks irrational can start to make sense.

Teams may resist change not because they do not understand it, but because it threatens their viability.

Departments may shift priorities not because they are being difficult, but because their environment has changed.

Stakeholders may diverge not because alignment has failed, but because they are responding to different pressures.

A service may nod through a project board, then slow down in practice because the change asks more of it than the formal impact assessment recognised.

We often call this resistance.

Sometimes it is.

But from inside the system, it may feel more like survival.

And survival has a habit of beating strategy.

That is not a moral judgement. It is a delivery reality. If a team is overloaded, uncertain, exposed or recovering from previous change, it will adapt in ways that protect itself. It may delay, reinterpret, simplify, avoid, comply on the surface or quietly preserve the old way of working for as long as possible.

The formal plan says, “This is what will happen.”

The living system asks, “Can we absorb this and still function?”

Those are different questions.

The quiet signals we miss

In cross-cutting work, whether D-TRO, procurement transformation, digital change or anything that moves across organisational boundaries, we spend a lot of time refining plans.

We spend less time sensing the environment those plans sit within.

What are people actually responding to right now?

A regulatory risk that has not yet been formally escalated.
A budget pressure that everyone knows is coming but nobody can quite quantify.
A cultural norm that quietly overrides policy.
A previous failure that nobody wants to repeat.
A local workaround that has become more trusted than the official process.
A team that is already at the edge of its capacity but still appears green in the report.

These signals rarely appear cleanly in structured governance artefacts.

But they drive behaviour.

This is where the organism metaphor earns its place. It encourages us to look for signals, not just structures. It asks us to notice the surrounding conditions, not only the delivery mechanism.

A machine can be fixed by finding the faulty part.

An organism has to be understood in relation to its environment.

Light through a medium

There is a physics analogy here that I cannot quite resist.

Light does not simply travel. It interacts with the medium it moves through. It bends, slows, scatters and changes direction. The same signal behaves differently depending on the environment.

We saw this dramatically in re-entry scenarios. Communications drop out not because the signal has stopped being sent, but because the medium around the spacecraft, ionised plasma, distorts or blocks it. Only when the environment changes does the signal become visible again.

Organisations behave in a similar way.

Our plans are the signal.

The organisation is the medium.

And what we observe as delay, resistance, drift or confusion may not mean the original signal was badly designed. It may mean the signal is being refracted by the environment it is travelling through.

That matters because the usual response is to strengthen the signal.

Say it again. Clarify the message. Tighten the milestone. Update the board paper. Add another checkpoint.

Sometimes that is exactly right.

But sometimes the issue is not the signal.

It is the medium.

Where our own work fits

This is also where I think the Impact → Interpretation → Action framing quietly aligns with Morgan.

We may not have described it this way at the start, but we have been working against the limits of the machine metaphor.

Impact tells us what is changing.

Interpretation recognises that people do not respond directly to change. They respond to what the change means for them.

Action asks what we will do about that.

That middle step, Interpretation, is where the organism becomes visible.

It is where meaning forms. It is where adaptation begins. It is where behaviour starts to shift long before the formal report catches up.

This is also why U3C matters.

Understanding.
Capability.
Commitment.
Capacity.

Those are not abstract categories. They are signs of whether the living system can absorb the change.

Does the service understand what is being asked?
Can people do it?
Do they want to support it?
Do they have room for it alongside everything else?

A machine metaphor might ask whether the process has been defined.

An organism metaphor asks whether the system can breathe.

The temptation to tighten control

When programmes start to drift, the instinct is familiar.

Tighten governance. Add checkpoints. Increase reporting. Ask for more detail. Bring the item back more frequently. Make the plan firmer.

In other words, we try to repair the machine.

Sometimes that works. If the issue is unclear ownership, weak planning or missing control, then tighter governance is exactly what is needed.

But sometimes it makes things worse because we are applying mechanical solutions to something behaving biologically.

An organism under pressure does not always respond well to increased constraint. It adapts around it. It conserves energy. It protects the vulnerable part of itself. It may comply visibly while resisting practically. It may give the governance system what it asks for while continuing to behave according to local pressures.

We have all seen versions of this.

A team attends the meeting, but does not really adopt the change.
A service signs off the process, but keeps the workaround.
A board accepts the recommendation, but the decision remains fragile.
A project is reported as moving forward, but the organisation has not moved with it.

That does not mean control is wrong.

It means control is incomplete.

If we only tighten the mechanism, we may miss the pressure that caused the adaptation.

A different question

So the question changes.

Not only:

“Why isn’t the plan being followed?”

But:

“What is the system trying to adapt to?”

That question may sound softer, but it is often more precise.

It leads us towards the real environment around the work:

Competing pressures.
Local constraints.
Informal practices.
Hidden incentives.
Capacity limits.
Previous disappointments.
Unspoken fears.
Survival strategies.

It asks us to look at the conditions shaping behaviour rather than treating behaviour as an unexplained deviation from the plan.

That is not an excuse for drift. It is a better diagnostic.

If a project is not moving as expected, we still need governance. We still need decisions, accountability and control. But we also need curiosity about the system we are trying to change.

What pressure is it under?
What is it protecting?
What is it conserving?
What is it adapting around?
What does it need in order to move safely?

Those questions may tell us more than another version of the same plan.

Where this gets interesting

If the first article challenged the idea that organisations behave like machines, this one introduces movement.

The organisation is not static. It responds. It adjusts. It absorbs pressure where it can and diverts it where it cannot.

That helps explain why delivery can feel so different from planning. A plan is drawn at a point in time. An organisation keeps breathing after the plan is approved.

But the organism metaphor also has limits.

Because organisations do not just adapt.

They interpret.

They negotiate.

They construct meaning.

Different parts of the same organisation may experience the same change in completely different ways. One team sees opportunity. Another sees threat. Another sees workload. Another sees loss of control. Another sees the return of something that failed last time.

Which raises a more unsettling question for the next piece.

If different parts of the organisation are interpreting the same change in different ways, are we even working on the same programme?

Part III: When Culture arrives.