Business Resilience: When People Stop Challenging How Work Gets Done

My first job out of university was at a very traditional advertising business. Digital was still this slightly suspicious new thing happening on the other side of the fence, while most of the serious people were getting on with making proper advertising.

The business could see where things were going though. It had ambitions to become a global powerhouse producing genuinely world-class work, and digital was clearly going to have to become part of that. So it found a strong leader, deliberately assembled a slightly eccentric group of people, gave us room to experiment and put us right in the middle of the building where we could basically run amok.

Everyone else had to walk past us every day. They saw the work, heard the conversations and encountered people approaching problems in completely different ways. Over time, they started asking questions and looking for ways we could work together.

Years later, I joined another traditional advertising business as its first digital strategist. I had been massively oversold on both the state of the business and the opportunity, and it soon became apparent that hiring me was expected to provide some sort of digital defibrillator to a business with almost no supporting capability.

Most of the people around me had spent their careers working in traditional advertising, but many had already checked out. They weren’t there for their careers anymore; they were there for their jobs. Get the work done, get paid and get on with life.

There was plenty of cynicism and very little curiosity. Ideas had been knocked down often enough that eventually there weren’t many ideas left to knock down. We did digital work, technically, but mostly it was traditional advertising squeezed into digital formats. The work had become passive, and that is the bit I think businesses should be paying attention to long before people actually start leaving.

Six very long months later, the business announced that it was closing.

You can be incredibly busy while working passively

I’ve thought about those two experiences quite a lot over the years. Both businesses saw the same broad change coming and both invested, in some form, in building the capability to respond to it. What I remember most clearly is how differently the people doing the work behaved.

In one, we were curious. People were encountering something new, asking questions and gradually figuring out what it could mean for their own work. In the other, people were still incredibly busy, but there was very little appetite left for questioning how things were being done.

We tend to notice when people stop working. I think there’s an earlier warning sign when they stop actively thinking about how the work could be better.

You can be incredibly busy while working passively. Deadlines still get hit, clients still get their work and meetings continue breeding with the reproductive enthusiasm of rabbits. Everyone can spend their day furiously moving things around without spending much time asking whether those things still make sense.

A concept I came across while studying emotional intelligence helped me make sense of some of what I had seen: System 1 and System 2 thinking.

The idea comes from the work of psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. System 1 is fast and automatic, helping us deal with familiar situations without consciously working through every decision. System 2 is slower and more deliberate. It’s what we call on when the answer isn’t immediately obvious or we need to properly challenge an assumption.

We need both. We’d be completely useless if every mundane decision required a committee meeting inside our heads. What interested me was what happened when fewer things seemed capable of making people stop and reconsider the familiar answer.

The same process gets followed because that’s the process. The same format gets used because that’s the format. Problems keep being solved in roughly the same way they were solved last time, until eventually the world has changed enough that yesterday’s perfectly sensible answer becomes today’s problem.

Eventually, people stop bothering

I saw another version of this later in my career. Every week, a significant number of expensive people would spend a significant amount of their time reporting on work they hadn’t had enough time to finish. Then every quarter we’d get together and discuss why the work wasn’t getting finished.

The same issues would come up. There would be frustration, shouting and finger-pointing. Different approaches would be suggested and dismissed as too soft, too woke or simply not how things were done. Everyone would return to work and three months later we’d perform another lap of essentially the same racetrack.

There had also been a pandemic, the economy wasn’t exactly throwing attractive alternatives around and people needed their salaries. So mostly they stayed. They worked hard, dealt with the volume and completed the reporting required to explain why they were struggling with the volume, occasionally getting berated for forgetting some tiny detail while trying to keep the whole circus moving.

After a while, people stopped trying to change the circus.

I’ve subsequently found a term for one version of this: acquiescent silence. Research into employee voice has found that repeated experiences of having little influence through speaking up can reduce people’s willingness to speak up again.

I didn’t know the terminology at the time. I just knew that no amount of nudging towards change seemed capable of shifting anything. It also helped me make sense of something I’ve since written about in employee disengagement: capable people can continue doing their jobs long after they’ve stopped believing that giving the business more of themselves will achieve much.

The leadership behaviour around it matters too. Under pressure, control can increase just as the organisation needs more challenge, honesty and learning. I’ve explored that separately in my piece on reactive and creative leadership, but at the time all I knew was that we kept having versions of the same conversation without much changing.

Eventually I decided it was time to abandon ship. Not long afterwards, the first round of retrenchments was announced.

Silence is not the same thing as stability

A quiet business can look remarkably healthy. The work gets done, customers haven’t disappeared, people aren’t causing too much trouble and the financials might still look perfectly respectable.

There is a fairly important difference between people having nothing useful to challenge and people having learned that challenging things isn’t worth the effort. From the boardroom, those two situations can look suspiciously similar.

I’ve written before about businesses continuing to perform while strain accumulates underneath them. I’ve also spent a lot of time trying to separate traditional change management from organisational resilience. For me, resilience increasingly comes down to whether a business retains the capacity and willingness to change before circumstances force it to.

If the people closest to the work have stopped suggesting alternatives, questioning familiar approaches or believing they can influence the system around them, some of that capacity may already be disappearing while everything still looks reasonably fine.

A P&L tells you what the business managed to produce. It doesn’t tell you much about whether the people inside it are still figuring out how the business needs to work next.

Purpose gives change somewhere to go

There was another difference in that first advertising business that I didn’t appreciate properly at the time. It had somewhere it genuinely wanted to go.

The ambition was to become a global powerhouse producing world-class work. Traditional advertising happened to be how much of that work had historically been produced, but the ambition wasn’t to become the world’s greatest preserver of traditional advertising.

When digital started changing the industry, developing digital capability made sense because of where the business wanted to go. The method could evolve while the ambition remained intact.

I’ve subsequently found a useful way of making sense of this through systems thinking: purpose gives all that change somewhere to go.

That first business said it wanted to produce world-class work and then invested in new capability before the old capability had stopped working. It recruited people who thought differently, gave us room to operate and deliberately exposed the rest of the business to what we were doing.

What it did lined up with where it said it wanted to go. That gave the business something stable while other things changed. The tools could change, the skills could change and how people worked together could change without losing sight of why any of it needed to change in the first place.

I’d start by getting out of the boardroom

Say your business is doing okay. Revenue looks alright, clients seem happy and nobody has accidentally set fire to anything important this week. How would you know whether it was quietly becoming less capable of dealing with whatever happens next?

I’d start by spending more time with the people doing the work.

How frequently do you actually do that? And when you do, what do those conversations look and feel like? Are people showing you things, challenging assumptions and telling you when something is making their work unnecessarily difficult? Are they frustrated because they still care enough to want something fixed, or have the conversations become increasingly polite?

I’d be particularly interested in two questions:

When was the last time somebody doing the work challenged how the work gets done, and what happened when they did?

If they raised something, everyone nodded thoughtfully, nothing happened and eventually they stopped raising it, the silence that follows doesn’t mean the problem disappeared. You’ve just stopped hearing about it.

Three things to do before the silence becomes expensive

None of this requires another transformation programme with a dramatic name and an 84-slide launch deck. I’d start considerably smaller.

1. Go and see the work

Spend 30 minutes this week with people actually doing the work. Skip the town hall, engagement survey and sanitised presentation of how everything supposedly functions, and get close enough to understand what doing the work actually feels like.

Then ask: “What have you stopped raising because nothing happened the last time?”

Resist the urge to immediately explain why everything is the way it is. Listen.

2. Change one thing someone challenges

You don’t have to implement every suggestion people make. Some ideas will be brilliant, some will be terrible and most will live somewhere in the enormous grey area between the two.

Find one recurring frustration raised by the people doing the work and close the loop. Change it if you can; if you can’t, explain why. Ideas disappearing into a black hole teaches people something too.

3. Deliberately expose the business to something new

That first advertising business did this by putting a collection of digital misfits in the middle of the building and letting us run amok. I’ve subsequently done versions of it through regular learning sessions, something I wrote about when exploring how a learning culture develops inside teams.

It doesn’t need to be complicated. Regularly bring in a piece of work, an idea, a tool, something another industry is doing or a completely different approach to a familiar problem and give people the space to explore it.

Then ask: “What could this change about how we work?”

Business resilience is usually discussed when something has already happened and we want to know how well the organisation will cope. I’m more interested in what happens before that.

When was the last time somebody doing the work challenged how the work gets done, and what happened when they did?

I’d start there.