B

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What changes
when the governing
logic is made explicit.

This is an anonymised case study of a public broadcaster that was functioning, but whose decisions were no longer forming a line.

“Working with Bart clarified something we had felt inside our organisation for years, but had never been able to articulate precisely.

He has an unusual ability to identify the underlying logic of an organisation — the convictions, principles, and intentions that already shape decisions, even when they remain implicit. His questions never felt like an interview or a strategy exercise. They felt like a process of making visible what was already there."

The casus

A publicly funded broadcaster with a long institutional history was facing a period of accelerating external pressure — political scrutiny, declining reach among younger audiences, and an internal debate about what the organisation was actually for. Strategic plans had been produced. Priorities had been set. And still, at the board level, the same questions returned: what are we, and what does that mean for what we do next?

Decisions were being made carefully and defensibly. But they were no longer forming a line. New initiatives sat alongside existing ones without a clear principle tying them together. The organisation was not failing. It was drifting — and the drift was becoming visible to the outside before it had been named on the inside.

01  WHAT I FOUND

The organisation functioned.
The programmes were strong.
The direction did not reproduce itself.

Three competing logics were shaping decisions simultaneously — a public service logic, a market logic, and an institutional continuity logic. None of them was wrong. All of them were present. And because none had been made explicit or resolved into a hierarchy, every consequential decision required its own negotiation.

The organisation was spending energy
re-justifying its identity rather than acting from it.

02  WHAT I DID

The difference between
interpretation and recognition.

Over several weeks, I conducted individual conversations with board members and senior directors, observed board sessions, reviewed two years of strategic documentation and internal communication, and tested a formulation of the governing principle.

The governing principle that emerged made explicit the logic that had been operating for a long time, but had never been stated. It traced back to the organisation's origin: not to reach everyone, but to provide a frame through which the world could be seen as richer and more multidimensional, for as many as possible.

By making it explicit, it became clear what could be justified from within that logic — and what could not. The principle did not define what the organisation should become. It clarified what its decisions had already been grounded in — and made that ground usable.

03  WHAT CHANGED

From defending every decision individually
to deciding from something.

In the six months following the engagement, three decisions that had been stalled for over a year were resolved within weeks — not because the answers were now obvious, but because the question had changed. The board was no longer asking “should we do this?” but “does this follow from who we are?”

“We stopped defending every decision individually.
We started deciding from something.”

Do you recognise a similar pattern in your organisation?

The first conversation establishes
whether the work is relevant.

BH

An organisation is not defined by what it says it values. It is defined by what its decisions consistently uphold.