The symptom
Consider an organisation where a newly appointed department head reverses several established practices within her first three months. Before doing so, she asked why each one existed. In every case, nobody currently in the organisation could explain the original reasoning. Two of the reversals later caused problems the original practices had, in fact, been quietly preventing — problems that surfaced only once the safeguard was already gone, which is what made them hard to connect back to the decision that removed it.
What leaders usually conclude
The easy story is generational: a new leader making her mark, moving fast, not yet appreciating what she inherited. It is a comfortable explanation because it locates the issue in the individual rather than in the organisation, and it is sometimes accurate. It is also, on its own, incomplete — it does not explain why nobody could produce the original reasoning when asked directly, before any reversal had taken place. An organisation that could readily explain its own practices would have given the new leader something concrete to weigh against her instinct to change them; this one could not.
What the evidence suggests
The organisation retained the behaviour and lost the reason. That is a specific and different failure from simple resistance to change, and it points toward something structural rather than personal: a practice survived because it had become habitual, not because anyone was actively maintaining an understanding of why it mattered.
Michael Beer and Russell Eisenstat, writing in Sloan Management Review from Harvard Business School, described this kind of gap as one of several “silent killers” of strategy implementation and organisational learning — barriers that are mutually reinforcing and, critically, often invisible to leadership precisely because no single failure announces itself. Poor vertical communication is one of the patterns they identify: information and reasoning that exists somewhere in the organisation but does not travel to where decisions about it are actually made, including upward into decisions about which practices to keep. As they put it, a barrier like this has to be turned into a capability before “any of the other barriers can be turned into capabilities either” — the point being that these gaps compound rather than sitting in isolation.
Amy Edmondson’s research on psychological safety adds a mechanism for why this happens quietly rather than loudly. Her Harvard Business School field study of 51 teams found that psychological safety, not team confidence, predicted whether people surfaced information and raised concerns. A practice’s rationale is a form of institutional knowledge that has to be actively surfaced and re-surfaced to survive staff turnover, restructuring, and time. Where raising “does anyone remember why we do this?” does not feel safe or worthwhile to ask, that knowledge erodes silently — not because anyone hides it, but because nobody is prompted to retrieve it before it is needed.
This is a particular kind of loss because it is entirely undramatic. Nobody makes a decision to forget; no single event marks the moment the reasoning disappears. A practice simply continues past the departure of the last person who understood it fully, carried forward by people who know that it is done, without anyone ever being in a position where checking why felt necessary — until, as in this scenario, someone finally asks.
Competing explanations
Both readings can be true at once, which is part of why this pattern is hard to diagnose from a distance. A new leader can genuinely be moving faster than is wise, and the organisation can genuinely have lost track of its own reasoning — and the second condition is what makes the first one dangerous, because it removes the safety net that would otherwise catch an overcorrection. An organisation with intact institutional memory can generally absorb a leader who asks “why do we do this?” and gets a real answer, adjusting course if the answer turns out to be weak. One that cannot produce an answer has nothing to push back with, which means the outcome depends entirely on the new leader’s own judgement being right — a much heavier burden than either explanation alone would suggest, and one that neither the “new leader moving too fast” story nor the “institutional memory lost” story fully captures on its own. It is worth adding that the two reversals which later caused problems are themselves informative: they suggest the original practices were solving something real, even though nobody could say what at the time they were removed — which is a different situation from a practice that turns out, on reflection, to have been genuinely unnecessary all along.
The same pattern appears across many kinds of organisation; see Other Sectors for how it is read elsewhere.
Questions worth considering
- For the organisation’s most habitual practices, could someone currently employed explain, without guessing, why each one exists?
- What does an organisation actually lose when it keeps a practice and loses the reasoning behind it — and would anyone notice before it mattered?
- How would a newly arrived leader distinguish a practice worth keeping from a habit nobody has examined in years?
- If the people who originally understood a given practice all left tomorrow, is that reasoning recorded anywhere they could not personally be asked?
This perspective is part of Leadership.
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