What Each Body of Research Found
On why improvement does not stay put. Nelson Repenning and John Sterman’s research at MIT Sloan School of Management, examining why process-improvement gains so often fail to hold, found that organisations under sustained pressure default to effort-based responses over structural ones — and, critically, that this default reasserts itself repeatedly, not just once. An organisation that achieves a genuine, structural improvement does not thereby become permanently immune to the same pressure dynamic; the capability trap can recur, later, around a different source of pressure, even after an earlier instance of it has been successfully addressed. Their research implies that operational excellence, understood as a static achievement, is not well supported by how organisations actually respond to pressure over time — the same forces that made improvement necessary in the first place do not stop existing once an improvement has been made.
On why documented and actual practice continuously diverge. Erik Hollnagel, Robert Wears and Jeffrey Braithwaite’s research, jointly published by the University of Southern Denmark, the University of Florida and Macquarie University, offers a complementary account. Their central argument is that operational work is never simply “finished being designed” — real work continuously requires situational adjustment that a fixed design, however excellent at the moment it was created, cannot fully anticipate. On their account, the gap between how work is formally imagined and how it is actually done is not a temporary defect to be closed once and then forgotten; it is an ongoing feature of any complex operational system, continuously regenerated as conditions change, regardless of how well the system was designed at any single point in time.
Where the Two Accounts Agree
Both bodies of research, approaching the question from different angles — one focused on organisational response to pressure, the other on the relationship between documented design and actual practice — converge on the same underlying implication: there is no stable equilibrium at which an operation, once genuinely excellent, simply stays excellent without continued attention. Pressure that produces the capability trap does not disappear once addressed; it recurs. The gap between designed practice and actual practice does not close permanently; it continuously regenerates as conditions shift. Operational excellence, on the combined evidence, functions less like a destination reached and more like a moving target requiring sustained attention to keep pace with — not because organisations are poorly managed, but because the underlying forces both bodies of research describe do not switch off once a good result has been achieved.
Where They Diverge
The two accounts differ somewhat in what they suggest actually erodes excellence over time. The capability-trap research points toward organisational pressure and incentives — the structural reasons visible effort keeps winning out over less visible maintenance, project after project, indefinitely. The work-as-imagined-versus-work-as-done research points toward something closer to an inherent property of complex operational work itself — the impossibility of any fixed design fully anticipating every future situational demand, regardless of organisational incentives or pressure levels. One account implies excellence erodes because of how organisations respond to pressure; the other implies it would erode even in the complete absence of pressure, simply because real conditions keep changing. Both processes plausibly operate simultaneously in most organisations, which may be part of why the erosion of operational excellence is so widely reported and so rarely permanently resolved by any single intervention.
A Further Consideration: The Target Itself Moves, Not Only the Organisation’s Grip on It
There is a third angle worth introducing, distinct from either account of erosion above, because it changes what “moving target” actually means. Jay Galbraith’s information-processing framework for organisation design argues that the coordination and information-processing burden an organisation must manage rises with its own scale and interdependence — meaning that what counts as operationally excellent at one size is not the same standard that applies once the organisation has grown. An operation that was genuinely excellent for an organisation of fifty people, judged against the coordination demands that size actually generated, is not automatically still excellent for the same organisation at two hundred people, even if nothing about the operation itself has been allowed to decay in the interim. The bar has moved because the underlying demand on the system has moved, independent of any erosion in the capability-trap or documentation-gap sense.
This third angle does not contradict either of the two examined above — it sits alongside them, and arguably compounds them. An organisation could, in principle, successfully resist both the capability trap and documentation drift within a given operational design, and still find that design gradually falling short of “excellent,” simply because growth has changed what excellence at its current scale requires. Combined, the three forces — recurring pressure-driven erosion, continuous documented-versus-actual divergence, and a rising bar driven by scale itself — offer a fuller account of why “moving target” is not merely a rhetorical flourish but a reasonably precise description of what the evidence, taken as a whole, actually shows.
What Remains Unresolved
Neither body of research specifies how much ongoing attention operational excellence actually requires to be sustained, nor what form that attention should take — and this article does not attempt to supply that answer, since doing so would move from evidence synthesis into prescriptive methodology outside its scope. What the combined evidence does establish is that the common framing of operational excellence as an achievable, stable end-state is not well supported by either body of research examined here. Both point, independently, toward a more dynamic picture: excellence as a condition an organisation is continuously either gaining ground on or losing ground against, rather than a fixed point it can permanently occupy once reached.
A final observation worth drawing from the synthesis: if both bodies of research are correct, then the language an organisation uses to describe its own operational maturity carries real consequences. Describing a process or system as “finished” or “mature” — language that implies the moving-target dynamic has somehow been resolved for that specific area — may itself contribute to the very erosion both bodies of research describe, by signalling that ongoing attention is no longer required precisely where, on the evidence, it still is. The framing an organisation adopts is not a neutral description of its own state; it shapes where attention continues to be paid and where it quietly stops.
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Questions worth considering
- Has any part of the organisation ever been described internally as having “achieved” operational excellence, and has that description held up over subsequent years?
- Where operational excellence has been maintained successfully over a long period, what ongoing attention has that actually required, and has it been sustained deliberately or by circumstance?
- If both bodies of research are right that excellence requires continuous maintenance rather than a one-time achievement, what would that suggest about how the organisation currently talks about its own operational maturity?
This perspective is part of Operations.
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