Five perfectly reasonable habits that end up breaking organisations

Complex organisations do not usually start with absurd rules. They start with reasonable solutions to real problems.

We have identified five that come up particularly often. The problem is not that they are always bad. The problem is that an idea useful in some circumstances easily becomes a permanent mechanism, then a reflex, then a way of working that ends up producing exactly what it was meant to avoid.

1. One more meeting so that everyone is aligned

A group discussion can be extremely effective. We hold meetings ourselves when a direct conversation is the best available tool. The problem appears when a meeting becomes the normal way to pass information around.

An important decision is made on Tuesday. Six people hear it first-hand. By Friday, several versions are circulating. Three weeks later, someone discovers that their work has depended from the start on information they never received.

The organisation naturally responds with more synchronisation. Daily stand-up. Project meeting. Cross-team committee. Committee preparation meeting. Committee minutes. The remedy gradually produces its own need.

At Cercle, a meeting is never the source of truth. It can produce a decision, but what must outlive the conversation becomes a written artifact, accessible and addressable.

The consequence is simple: you do not need to have been in the right room at the right time to understand what was decided.

2. Getting everyone to agree in order to avoid a bad decision

Consulting widely is good practice. For important decisions we even consider it indispensable. But consulting and deciding are two different things.

When everyone has to agree before moving forward, several things happen. Decisions get slower. Responsibilities get blurrier. And the option that wins is not necessarily the best one. It is sometimes simply the one nobody dislikes enough to keep opposing.

At Cercle, every topic has a clearly identified owner. They listen, seek out contradiction and prepare the decision. Then they decide. Contradiction is expected before the decision, collective commitment is expected after it.

The disagreement is not erased. It stays visible. But once the decision is made, we stop endlessly renegotiating its existence.

3. Measuring more to finally know what is going on

Indicators are useful. Without measurement, a system is hard to understand. But one boundary must be extremely clear.

An indicator used to understand the work does not have the same function as an indicator used to judge the person doing that work. As soon as the two blur, the system starts to deform. Workloads get understated. Bad news arrives later. Tickets get sliced differently. The numbers gradually become a representation of what the organisation wishes to see.

At Cercle, operational data serves to spot congestion, a capacity problem or a dependency. It is never used to evaluate a person. The boundary is deliberately absolute.

4. Deciding fast to keep moving

Speed of decision looks like an obvious virtue. It is one, for decisions that are easy to reverse. Quickly picking a temporary tool or changing a local detail does not require two weeks of analysis.

But the same reflex becomes dangerous when a decision strongly shapes what follows. Technical architecture. Critical supplier. Business model. Key hire. Commitment that is hard to unwind.

Choosing too early can give an impression of speed while creating an enormous amount of extra work later. Once a solution is selected, the following decisions start to build on it. Then it becomes psychologically and financially harder and harder to turn back. You are no longer looking for the best solution. You are trying to make the one you already chose work.

For structuring decisions, we open several options, test them and progressively eliminate those that do not survive the facts. It sometimes looks slower in the first weeks. Above all, it avoids spending several years perfecting the wrong direction.

5. Setting individual objectives to reward the best

The idea is seductive. We define clearly what we expect from each person. We measure the result. We reward those who meet their objectives. It works very well if people work in independent systems.

A company almost never works that way. Work is interdependent. Helping someone can reduce your own visible output. Solving a cross-team problem may match none of your objectives. Turning down a deal that is bad for the company can reduce your sales figures.

Once a financial reward is attached to an individual objective, we naturally transform the way people arbitrate their time. Once again, the problem is not moral. The system produces the behaviour.

At Cercle, individual pay is indexed neither to annual objectives nor to visible activity. We recognise durable mastery, responsibility and the ability to pass knowledge on.

What these five have in common

These five examples resemble one another. Each time, we try to solve human uncertainty with more control mechanisms.

Our approach is rather to make responsibilities, decisions, commitments and problems explicit enough for that uncertainty to be managed without turning all work into procedure.