BH
How competence
can coexist with
structural disorientation
Reading time: ± 7:00 min
Meetings still happen.
Decisions still get made.
Reports are discussed and approved.
And yet, something subtle shifts beneath the surface.
Some decisions seem to require more explanation afterward than they did when they were made. Alignment meetings multiply without anyone having explicitly called for them. Communication between the board and management becomes something closer to interpretive mediation. Nobody feels fully directional anymore — but nobody says so. The institution becomes more cautious, without explicitly changing course. Nobody is alarmed. That is, in itself, part of the problem.
There is a word for this. Drift.
Drift does not announce itself as a rupture. It announces itself as continuity. Boards are designed to intervene when something goes wrong: incidents, risks, escalations. Their instruments presuppose failure as an identifiable event.
Drift, unlike failure, arrives gradually and without a clear signal. It manifests as a gradual shift in orientation — one in which identity persists as language, but loses its function as a load-bearing reference point for decision-making. Strategic intentions remain nameable. In practice, different incentives become directional. Nothing breaks. And yet the whole loses its line.
Over time, the board becomes highly proficient at secondary questions. Compliance, optimisation, risk management — handled professionally. That is legitimate. But it is not directional.
The primary question — for what purpose does this organisation exist, and how is that visible in its decisions — remains implicit. Not because it is secondary, but because explicit priorities make future inconsistencies harder to justify.
That is an uncomfortable thing to formalise. So it rarely is.
Complexity is compensated for with additional structure. More committees, more dashboards, more layers of oversight. Each addition is rational. Together, they increase the distance between intention and incentive, between responsibility and authority, between what is called important and what actually steers.
Under this pressure, the function of judgement changes. Decisions are correct, but not directional. They are no longer assessed on coherence, but on defensibility.
Defensibility protects against accountability. It does not orient.
In this way, the board shifts from holding direction to avoiding risk. What shifts here are legitimacies. Public and organisational legitimacy — including oversight, explainability, and compliance — gains increasing weight. Professional and moral legitimacy — quality, justification, meaning — become subordinate.
As long as identity remains implicit, the institution loses its ability to determine which legitimacy should lead under pressure.
Competence stays intact. Orientation disappears.
Drift is therefore not the result
of weak individuals in the wrong places.
It is structural.
Boards operate under ambiguity and time pressure. In those conditions, direction can only hold when judgement is anchored in explicit identity: a shared understanding of what takes precedence when values, interests, responsibilities, and legitimacies begin to conflict. Without that anchor, decisions remain defensible, but cease to accumulate into direction.
This much is widely understood, at least in retrospect. What is less understood is what happens next — after the governing logic has been named.
Explication is the beginning of the work, not its completion.
Organisations that name their governing principle without defending it in practice enter a more advanced form of the same problem. The principle is present in strategy documents and board presentations. It is absent in who gets promoted, whose interpretation carries weight in conflict, which exceptions quietly become routine, and what kind of leadership the organisation selects for when a position opens.
Direction holds only when the organisation is willing to defend it — in hiring, in succession, in what it tolerates and what it does not. Identity is not what an organisation says it values. It is what its decisions consistently uphold when upholding it costs something.
This is where drift becomes harder to reverse. Not because the direction was wrong, but because the people with the most influence have, over time, developed their own working version of it. Not through deliberate subversion — through the ordinary accumulation of decisions made without reference to the governing logic. The principle loses authority not because it was rejected, but because it was never protected.
That protection is structural. It lives in which behaviours are consistently rewarded and which are not. In whether the organisation is willing to have a difficult conversation with someone who performs well by every professional standard, but cannot carry the direction. In whether succession is treated as a continuity question, not just of competence, but of what the organisation is actually for.
Most organisations are unwilling to pay that price. So they name the direction, feel the relief of having done so, and drift again — now with better vocabulary.
Most organisations are unwilling to pay that price.
So they name the direction, feel the relief of having done so, and drift again — now with better vocabulary.
Recovery requires not acceleration, but explication — and then the harder work that follows it.
Which convictions turned out to be directional without ever being named? Which thresholds shaped decisions? Which principles functioned silently as limits? Once these become visible, coherence can return — not through consensus, but through a framework.
But a framework only holds when the organisation accepts what it implies: that some decisions are now outside the logic, that some interpretations are no longer equally valid, that some behaviours can no longer be accommodated without consequence. A governing principle that excludes nothing governs nothing.
Failure is loud. Drift is silent. And if drift can emerge through the very mechanisms institutions associate with competence — continuity, defensibility, optimisation, procedural rationality — then a harder question follows.
How does an institution distinguish between adaptation, survival, and self-erosion?
And having named that distinction: is it willing to act on the answer?
Neither announces itself.
2026 — © Bart Heideman
BH
An organisation is not defined by what it says it values. It is defined by what its decisions consistently uphold.