BH
On organisations,
legitimacy, and language as
a mechanism of stabilisation
Reading time: ± 8:00 min
Most organisations begin differently from how they end.
In the beginning, there is a genuine problem to solve. The organisation exists because something was broken, missing, or possible in a way nobody had yet acted on. That original disruption — the moment of real necessity — gives the organisation its energy, its identity, and its reason to exist. Direction is not yet a policy. It is a conviction.
As the organisation grows, something shifts. The disruption that once defined it becomes a story the organisation tells about itself. What was once a live question — are we still doing what we set out to do? — becomes a settled answer. The founding moment hardens into mythology. And mythology, unlike conviction, does not need to be tested. It only needs to be repeated.
At that point, language changes its function. Where it once served to explore and challenge, it becomes a means of unapologetic self-belief — fixing coherence around an image the organisation needs of itself. Not to deceive, but to stabilise. To keep functioning while the space for genuine uncertainty diminishes.
What first kept things open begins to close.
What gave direction begins to protect.
As the organisation grows, more comes to be at stake. Expectations increase, visibility grows, responsibility becomes more explicit. What could previously be worked out internally now carries meaning for a broader environment. The organisation must position itself, explain itself, take stances.
In that transition, a different kind of necessity arises. Not everything can remain open. Choices must be made, lines set, positions taken. What previously coexisted must be brought together into something manageable.
What is not explicitly ordered is necessarily implicitly filtered. What supports stability takes precedence. What introduces tension loses position. What does not fit within the image the organisation needs of itself does not disappear as fact — it disappears as possibility. Alternative meanings are not contradicted. They lose their access to what still counts as realistic.
In this way, an identity forms that gives direction — but also sets limits. It makes action possible and provides orientation precisely when that is most needed. But that is exactly where its effect lies. What stabilises simultaneously closes.
What remains is an organisation that functions coherently. Decisions are made, behaviour is explicable, communication is consistent. But the capacity to see what that action produces diminishes. Not because perception is absent, but because it can no longer participate in how the organisation understands itself.
Where legitimacies are not explicitly ordered, coherence organises itself as self-preservation. And where coherence organises itself as self-preservation, the system loses its capacity to perceive itself.
Where legitimacies are not explicitly ordered, coherence organises itself as self-preservation.
And where coherence organises itself as self-preservation, the system loses its capacity to perceive itself.
This is the point at which most accounts of organisational ego become reassuring. They suggest that making the implicit explicit restores openness — that once the filtering mechanism is named, the organisation regains its capacity for self-correction.
That is partly true. And it is not the whole story.
Naming the mechanism is necessary. It is not sufficient. Because what the ego protects is not only a self-image — it protects a distribution of influence. The people and interpretations that have thrived under the existing implicit order have a stake in its continuation. They are not necessarily aware of that stake. But they will feel the disruption when the order is questioned, and they will resist it — not always overtly, but through the ordinary mechanisms of organisational life: which conversations get traction, whose interpretations carry weight, what gets treated as realistic, and what does not.
This means that restoring the organisation’s capacity to perceive itself is not a neutral act. It is a political one. It requires someone — or a group — with both the clarity to name what is being filtered and the authority to insist that what has been filtered back in is taken seriously. That insistence will create friction. It will be experienced by those who benefit from the current order as destabilising. It may be framed as divisive, or premature, or insufficiently constructive.
That framing is itself part of the mechanism.
What returns, therefore, is not simply openness. It is contested openness — a condition in which the organisation’s capacity for self-perception is rebuilt through conflict rather than consensus. Not conflict for its own sake, but the unavoidable friction of making visible what the system has been organised to keep invisible.
The ego does not dissolve. It loses its closed form. It remains necessary as an organising principle — but it no longer needs to protect what it cannot see. Coherence then arises not through reduction, but through conscious ordering: what carries more weight when, and why, and on whose authority.
What returns is not complete openness. It is sight — hard-won, contested, and only possible when someone in the organisation is willing to bear the cost of insisting on it.
2026 — © Bart Heideman
BH
An organisation is not defined by what it says it values. It is defined by what its decisions consistently uphold.