Tuesday Reality: The Explanation Comes Last

The Story We Tell Ourselves

One of the most comforting assumptions in professional life is the belief that organisations make decisions in a rational and objective manner. We are taught that performance drives progression, that facts guide outcomes, and that evidence ultimately determines important decisions. While few people believe the system is perfect, most assume that competence, effort, and results exert the greatest influence over their careers.

The appeal of this belief is understandable. It provides a sense of order. It suggests that organisations operate according to rules that can be understood and that success remains largely within our control.

Yet experience often reveals a more complicated reality.

The longer one spends inside large organisations, the harder it becomes to maintain the illusion that important decisions emerge solely from objective evaluation. Human systems rarely function according to neat chains of cause and effect. They evolve through changing incentives, shifting priorities, competing interests, personal relationships, budgetary constraints, leadership transitions, and countless other forces that remain invisible to most of the people affected by them.

Dismissals merely provide one of the clearest windows into this phenomenon.

When someone leaves an organisation, the explanation generally arrives fully formed. Performance concerns, restructuring, strategic realignment, cultural fit, budget pressure, or changing business needs all make regular appearances. Sometimes these explanations contain genuine elements of truth. The more interesting question is whether they represent the beginning of the story or its conclusion.

In many cases, they are the conclusion.

Organisations Have Always Rewritten Their Decisions

This behaviour is neither modern nor uniquely corporate.

History offers countless examples of institutions constructing simple narratives around decisions that emerged from far more complex circumstances. Political leaders have justified wars through noble principles while responding to economic realities. Empires have spoken of stability while reacting to internal decline. Governments have presented strategic necessity as moral certainty.

The explanation often follows the decision rather than preceding it.

This does not necessarily imply deception. More often, it reflects the natural tendency of human systems to simplify complexity. A coherent story proves easier to communicate than a tangled web of incentives, pressures, personalities, and unintended consequences.

Corporations inherited the same tendency.

When organisations explain why a project succeeded, why a strategy failed, or why a leader departed, the official narrative usually captures part of the truth. The challenge lies in the fact that complex systems rarely produce outcomes from a single cause. Human beings also possess a remarkable ability to reconstruct events once the outcome is known. Psychologists describe related mechanisms such as hindsight bias and motivated reasoning, through which individuals unconsciously reinterpret events to create a coherent and defensible narrative.

The explanation therefore survives not because it captures every contributing factor, but because it is understandable, socially acceptable, and easy to communicate. As a result, people often mistake the explanation for the decision itself.

How Systems Actually Converge

Systems thinking teaches a different lesson.

Most significant outcomes emerge not from isolated events but from the accumulation of multiple reinforcing forces. The collapse of a bridge rarely originates from a single crack. Market leaders rarely disappear because of a single bad quarter. Organisations seldom transform because of a single initiative.

Human systems behave similarly.

Consider a senior leader who leaves a company. The official explanation may focus on performance, but performance often represents only a small part of a much larger picture. A new executive team may have arrived with different priorities. Budget pressure may have increased scrutiny on certain functions. Strategic focus may have shifted away from areas that previously enjoyed strong support. Sponsors may have departed. Political influence may have weakened. Organisational attention may have moved elsewhere.

Christopher Alexander observed that systems frequently struggle when a growing misfit develops between a structure and the environment it inhabits. Organisations exhibit a similar dynamic. A leader who once fitted perfectly within a given context may suddenly appear misaligned, not because the individual changed, but because the environment around them evolved. The explanation eventually focuses on the person. The deeper story often begins with the changing relationship between the person and the system.

History provides numerous examples of systems converging towards failure long before the failure itself becomes visible.

The collapse of the French Army in 1940 is often remembered as a sudden military catastrophe. Contemporary explanations frequently focused on individual commanders, tactical mistakes, or specific operational decisions. Later analysis revealed a more complex picture. France possessed capable soldiers, substantial industrial capacity, and many of the technological assets required to defend itself. The deeper problem lay elsewhere. Military doctrine, command structures, and decision-making processes had gradually become optimised for the realities of the previous war rather than the rapidly changing conditions of the next. The defeat appeared sudden. The misfit between the institution and its environment had accumulated for years.

A similar pattern emerged decades later in British industry. The decline of British Leyland is often attributed to poor quality, labour disputes, or ineffective management. Each explanation contains some truth. None explains the whole story. The company suffered from years of accumulated complexity, fragmented product portfolios, conflicting incentives, political intervention, organisational instability, and an inability to maintain coherence across the system. By the time the decline became obvious, the underlying conditions had been developing for a very long time. Observers searched for a decisive event. The reality was an accumulation of reinforcing pressures.

Both examples illustrate a lesson that applies equally to organisations today. Significant outcomes rarely emerge from a single cause. They emerge from systems that gradually lose alignment with reality while continuing to function well enough to conceal the drift.

Over time, organisations converge towards conclusions that appear sudden to outside observers. Once that convergence reaches a certain point, the formal explanation follows naturally. The explanation may be factually correct, yet it frequently obscures the broader set of forces that made the outcome increasingly likely.

Most people search for a triggering event, whereas systems usually operate through accumulation.

Entropy and the Loss of Reality

Not all organisations drift equally far from reality.

Some remain remarkably capable of discussing difficult decisions with honesty and clarity. Others develop explanations that bear little resemblance to what employees observe around them. The difference rarely originates from the character of the individuals involved. More often, it reflects the health of the system itself.

In What Is Life?, Erwin Schrödinger observed that living organisms survive by continuously resisting entropy. Order does not sustain itself. Every living system must constantly import what he called negative entropy in order to preserve coherence and structure. Left unattended, disorder inevitably accumulates.

Organisations appear to follow a similar pattern.

Trust does not maintain itself. Institutional memory does not maintain itself. Accountability does not maintain itself. Even the ability to describe reality accurately does not maintain itself. All require continuous investment through feedback, challenge, measurement, transparency, and disciplined reflection.

When those mechanisms weaken, entropy begins to accumulate. Processes gradually detach from purpose. Metrics become disconnected from outcomes. Language becomes separated from meaning. Eventually explanations themselves begin to drift away from observable reality.

Importantly, this does not require dishonesty.

In many cases, the individuals involved genuinely believe the explanation they provide. Human beings naturally simplify complexity. They remove ambiguity, uncertainty, and contradiction in order to produce narratives that are understandable and defensible. The resulting explanation may therefore feel entirely sincere while still failing to capture the forces that actually shaped the outcome.

The danger lies in the widening gap between reality and explanation.

Healthy systems continuously reduce that gap. They encourage dissent, revisit assumptions, challenge convenient narratives, and expose themselves to uncomfortable feedback. These mechanisms function as a form of organisational negative entropy. They reconnect the organisation to the reality it must navigate.

Unhealthy systems move in the opposite direction. Explanations become increasingly detached from observable facts. Behaviour and narrative diverge. Employees stop trusting what they are told and begin paying attention only to what they see.

At that point, the organisation faces a subtle but serious form of decay. Decisions continue to be made, yet the system gradually loses its ability to explain those decisions accurately, even to itself.

The Signals Often Appear Earlier

One consequence of this dynamic is that organisations frequently communicate their intentions long before they communicate their decisions.

The signals rarely appear through formal mechanisms. Performance reviews often remain positive. Objectives continue to look reasonable on paper. Meetings proceed as normal.

Instead, they emerge through patterns.

Important discussions occur elsewhere. Decisions arrive with less consultation. Strategic conversations gradually move beyond a person's sphere of influence. Feedback becomes less specific. Priorities shift without clear explanation. Relationships that once accelerated progress become less effective.

Viewed individually, these changes appear insignificant. Viewed collectively, they often reveal a system that has already begun moving in a particular direction.

Christophe Dejours observed similar mechanisms in his work on organisational suffering. Behaviours that would once have been considered unacceptable gradually become normalised as the system adapts to its own distortions. The shift rarely occurs suddenly. It emerges through accumulation, compromise, and repeated rationalisation.

Many professionals recognise these patterns only in retrospect. At the time, they naturally focus on individual incidents rather than systemic trends. They search for the meeting, the conversation, or the mistake that explains everything.

Unfortunately, complex systems rarely provide such convenient answers.

Why Leaders Should Care

This observation extends far beyond dismissals.

The same mechanism appears whenever organisations justify major decisions. Reorganisations, strategic pivots, acquisitions, technology choices, hiring freezes, transformation programmes, and even product strategy often follow similar patterns. The public explanation captures part of the reality while leaving the deeper forces unspoken.

People do not expect complete transparency. Most understand that organisations cannot communicate every detail behind every decision. However, employees possess a remarkable ability to detect gaps between observed behaviour and official narratives. When those gaps become too large, confidence deteriorates.

Eventually, people stop listening to explanations and start studying actions instead, because actions often provide the more accurate description of the system's priorities.

Leaders should therefore spend less time crafting narratives and more time preserving the mechanisms that keep organisations connected to reality. Honest feedback, dissent, measurement, institutional memory, and intellectual humility may appear costly in the short term. In practice, they often represent the organisational equivalent of negative entropy. They are the forces that prevent drift.

Conclusion

Most organisations do not deliberately lie. They simplify.

Unfortunately, simplification often removes the very forces that mattered most.

By the time an explanation reaches the people affected, the decision has already passed through layers of incentives, constraints, politics, economics, relationships, assumptions, and institutional self-preservation. The final story sounds cleaner than reality because reality rarely fits inside a meeting invitation or a corporate announcement.

The deeper lesson extends beyond any individual dismissal, reorganisation, or strategic decision.

Healthy organisations continuously import reality. They expose themselves to contradiction. They challenge their own assumptions. They maintain the difficult discipline of confronting facts that may be uncomfortable, inconvenient, or politically costly.

Without those mechanisms, entropy inevitably accumulates. As entropy grows, explanations become easier to produce but harder to believe. The gap between reality and narrative widens. The organisation may continue functioning, yet it gradually loses its ability to understand itself accurately.

That may be one of the clearest signs that organisational decay has already begun.