We Got Good at Sabotaging Ourselves

Organizations have honed the skill of undermining their own success. I don’t mean that as an insult. I mean it as a diagnosis.

Andrew and I wrote HumanCorps because we kept seeing the same paradox: institutions that are filled with smart people, impressive strategies, and increasingly powerful technology still manage, almost predictably, to erode the very conditions that made them successful. They squeeze, they control, they optimize, they accelerate… and then they wonder why the system becomes brittle, anxious, non-linear, and ultimately incomprehensible.

That’s the BANI trap we describe in the book. And the most unsettling part is that it isn’t rare. It’s become normal.

The Gap That Turns Success Into Self-Harm

If you want to watch an organization undermine itself in real time, don’t look for scandal. Look for routine. Look for the transformation program that focuses on what’s easy to quantify: operating models, reporting lines, systems, processes, headcount, floor plans. Those are the “formal” elements i.e., tangible, measurable, manipulable). And they matter.

But HumanCorps argues that the real game is happening in the “informal” system: capability, engagement, team effectiveness, culture. These are the lived reality of how people decide, collaborate, and respond under pressure. The informal is harder, slower, and less legible to dashboards. So it gets “managed” superficially, often in service of business priorities and timelines.

That’s where self-sabotage starts. Because when you change structures without changing beliefs, you don’t get transformation. You get costume changes.

And when the costume changes keep coming (whether reorg after reorg, tool after tool, or KPI after KPI, or some unhealthy admixture of all of the above) the organization begins to teach its people a quiet lesson: none of this is about you becoming more capable. It’s about you becoming more controllable.

The Industrial-Age Reflex: Control Feels Like Safety

One of the most consistent patterns we discuss is how formal hierarchies react to disruption: they tighten.

Annual targets become quarterly. Quarterly becomes monthly. Measurement becomes surveillance. Reporting becomes a substitute for trust.

The hierarchy “feels safe” because it’s doing what it was designed to do: impose control. But in a hyper-disruptive environment, that reflex creates brittleness. The system becomes fragile precisely because it can’t learn fast enough.

This is what I mean by undermining success. Organizations don’t fail because they lack intelligence. They fail because their default reflex under uncertainty is to reduce agency, the very fuel required for adaptation.

Neuroscience: Why Organizations Trigger the Brain Against Themselves

If you want to understand why this spiral accelerates, you have to get honest about biology.

Under stress, the brain’s capacity for flexible reasoning and judgement deteriorates. Prefrontal cortex functions (e.g., working memory, inhibition, cognitive flexibility) are impaired by stress chemistry (Arnsten, 2009). Chronic stress reshapes vulnerability and plasticity in ways that make complex learning and adaptation harder over time (McEwen & Morrison, 2013).

So when organizations create constant pressure through change fatigue, time compression, and threat-based performance systems, they aren’t just making people unhappy.

They are pushing the workforce into a neurobiological state where:

• people become more risk-averse,
• learning narrows to “don’t get in trouble,”
• creativity becomes dangerous,
• and collaboration becomes political.

This is why superficial culture efforts don’t land. You can’t ask for innovation while people’s nervous systems are bracing for punishment.

The Management Myth That Keeps Paying Dividends (Until It Doesn’t)

We trace a lot of this back to Taylorist assumptions: that workers are primarily motivated by carrots and sticks, and that management’s job is to design incentives and oversight to extract productivity. It’s a compelling myth because it’s measurable. It gives leaders levers.

But it also creates the modern catch-22: organizations become obsessed with maximizing cost:return per worker, so they keep searching for “new and creative” ways to make the carrot juicier or the stick sharper—rather than questioning the premise. That’s self-sabotage disguised as discipline.

Motivation research has long shown that extrinsic reward systems can undermine intrinsic interest in the work itself (Greene & Lepper, 1974). And self-determination theory clarifies why: autonomy, competence, and relatedness are foundational needs for sustainable motivation and engagement (Deci & Ryan, 2000). When you design systems that reduce autonomy (control), stunt competence (no time to learn), and fracture relatedness (internal competition), you don’t just lose morale.

You lose performance quality.

What Andrew and I Were Trying to Do With HumanCorps

We weren’t trying to write another leadership book full of principles people already agree with. We were trying to build a compass, not a map, for leaders who can feel that the old organizational architecture is no longer fit for purpose. Our aim was to pull together what we’ve learned from neuroscience, organizational development, social psychology, and real organizational practice, and translate it into a coherent operating model for the Wisdom Age.

Three intentions sat at the core:

1) Replace control with conditions. Leadership in HumanCorps is not charisma or command. It is the act of creating conditions for others to thrive, decide, and grow into leaders. That means transparency, humility, experimentation, and accountability.

2) Move from “answers at the top” to collective sensemaking. No single individual can grasp the full picture in real time. So we need structures that foster shared meaning: sensemaking as a social discipline, not a solo executive privilege (Weick, 1995; Maitlis & Christianson, 2014).

3) Build organizations around ownership and agency, individually and collectively. In our model, ownership is duty and commitment; agency is belief in the freedom and ability to act. Together they create the capacity for wisdom generation: better decisions that are informed, ethical, and context-aware.

And, crucially, purpose isn’t PR. We argue that orientational purpose acts as social glue — anchoring shared beliefs and creating a powerful social motivation: shared reality. Shared reality can unify and mobilize a workforce, but it must be cultivated deliberately, because it can also harden into echo chambers when trust becomes “people like us think this” rather than “we tested this” (Higgins, 2019).

The Way Out: Stop “Transforming” and Start Rebuilding the Human System

If organizations have honed the skill of undermining their own success, it’s because they’ve perfected formal change while starving informal capability. The answer isn’t to abandon structure or metrics. It’s to stop pretending those are the main event.

The main event is whether your organization can:

• learn without panic,
• disagree without punishment,
• decide without bottlenecks,
• and adapt without breaking trust.

That’s why I keep coming back to a line we wrote near the end: this work begins with a decisive step. An experiment, a shift in information flow, a policy that rebuilds incentives around trust rather than control. Because the future doesn’t belong to the best-designed org chart. It belongs to the organization that stops sabotaging its own human capacity.

Works referenced

• Arnsten, AFT. 2009. Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 10.6.410-22. https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn2648
• Deci, EL, & Ryan, RM. 2000. The “what” and “why” of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry 11.4.227-68. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/S15327965Pli1104_01
• Greene, D & Lepper, MR. 1974. Effects of extrinsic rewards on children’s subsequent intrinsic interest. Child development 1141-45. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/4143868/
• Higgins, ET. 2019. Shared Reality: What Makes Us Strong and Tears Us Apart. Oxford University Press. https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=hNGaDwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=%E2%80%A2%09Higgins,+ET.+2019.+Shared+Reality:+What+Makes+Us+Strong+and+Tears+Us+Apart.+Oxford+University+Press.&ots=eZYwJbNYXU&sig=xdhzvwpFcjl0rvYP2JaCY6SRQI4
• Kosfeld, M, Heinrichs, M, Zak, PJ, Fischbacher, U, & Fehr, E. 2005. Oxytocin increases trust in humans. Nature 435.7042.673-76. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature03701
• Lepper, MR & Greene, D. 2015. Overjustification research and beyond: Toward a means-ends analysis of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. In The hidden costs of reward (pp. 109-148). Psychology Press. https://api.taylorfrancis.com/content/chapters/edit/download?identifierName=doi&identifierValue=10.4324/9781315666983-8&type=chapterpdf
• Maitlis, S & Christianson, M. 2014. Sensemaking in organizations: Taking stock and moving forward. Academy of Management Annals 8.1.57-125. https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/19416520.2014.873177
• McEwen, BS, & Morrison, JH. 2013. The brain on stress: Vulnerability and plasticity of the prefrontal cortex over the life course. Neuron 79.1.16-29. https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(13)00544-8
• Weick, K. E. (1995). Sensemaking in Organizations. Sage. https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=nz1RT-xskeoC&oi=fnd&pg=PR7&ots=zJ3qB7fo4e&sig=qmb_KA–WN4wlNy_AdJeRRKxGI8