On disruption

As disruption becomes a persistent feature of the organisational environment, familiar assumptions about stability, control, and efficiency begin to weaken. This essay explores how those assumptions shape organisational behaviour under pressure, and why many responses to disruption misdiagnose what is actually being exposed.

Disruption as a persistent condition

Disruption has always been part of organisational life. For much of the past century, it was episodic, an event organisations responded to, absorbed and then back to business as usual.

Increasingly, that framing no longer holds. Disruption now reflects a wider set of macro-environmental forces, both natural and man-made, that bear down continuously on organisations. These external pressures are compounded by the internal disruption they generate, shaping behaviour, expectations, and patterns of work.

Today, disruption is no longer a rare occurrence. It has become an environmental condition.

Many of these forces are interacting and reinforcing one another. Their combined effect amplifies market volatility and makes the future increasingly difficult to predict.

Under these conditions, linear assumptions about planning, execution, and control begin to weaken. Optimising for efficiency works well in a predictable environment, but far less so when disruption becomes persistent.

Today, disruption is no longer a rare occurrence. It has become an environmental condition.

The assumption organisations still rely on

Most organisations are still designed on an assumption that is no longer reliable: that stability is the default condition, and disruption is a temporary deviation from it.

This assumption is embedded deeply in organisational structures. Planning cycles presume a future that can be forecast with reasonable accuracy. Governance models assume time to analyse, escalate and correct. Performance systems prioritise efficiency, risk reduction and consistency. Taken together, these design choices reflect an environment where cause and effect are sufficiently separated in time to allow for control.

When disruption was episodic, this logic largely held. Organisations could absorb shocks, restore equilibrium, and continue operating much as before. Stability was something to return to.

As disruption becomes persistent, that return point increasingly disappears. The organisation continues to operate as if predictability will re-emerge, even as conditions make that less likely. The result is not immediate failure, but growing strain: decision processes slow, information is filtered to preserve coherence and uncertainty is pushed upward rather than resolved where it emerges.

These outcomes are often misread as execution problems or leadership shortcomings. In reality, they are the predictable consequences of organisations designed for an environment that no longer exists.

Disruption does not break organisations by overwhelming them. It exposes the assumptions they were built on.

What changes when disruption becomes the norm

When disruption shifts from episodic to persistent, the most significant change is not an increase in activity or pressure, but a change in how cause and effect relate to one another.

In relatively stable conditions, organisations benefit from time. There is space between signal and consequence, between decision and outcome. This temporal separation allows for analysis, escalation, correction and learning after the fact. Organisational coherence is maintained by smoothing variability and absorbing noise.

As disruption becomes persistent, that buffering time begins to collapse. Signals arrive closer to their consequences. Feedback loops shorten or overlap. The organisation is required to interpret incomplete information while effects are still unfolding. What was once sequential becomes simultaneous.

What changes under persistent disruption is not just the volume of decisions or the pace of work, but the conditions under which organisational sense-making itself takes place.

Under these conditions, ambiguity increases at the boundaries where decisions are made. Information is harder to interpret in isolation. Decisions feel riskier not because the stakes have risen, but because the context in which they are made is less stable. The organisation experiences a growing tension between the need to act and the desire to preserve certainty.

This compression alters how organisations behave. Uncertainty is increasingly managed through delay, escalation or simplification. Coherence is maintained by filtering information rather than expanding interpretation. Action becomes cautious or fragmented, not through lack of intent, but as a response to the loss of reliable reference points.

These shifts are subtle. They do not announce themselves as breakdowns. Instead, they appear as friction, hesitation and an accumulation of unresolved decisions. Over time, the organisation expends more energy maintaining internal order than responding to its environment.

What changes under persistent disruption is not just the volume of decisions or the pace of work, but the conditions under which organisational sense-making itself takes place.

How organisations respond under strain

When disruption becomes persistent, the effects do not initially appear as failure. They surface as gradual changes in how the organisation functions day to day.

Sensing begins to degrade. Information still flows, but it is increasingly filtered, delayed, or shaped to preserve coherence rather than accuracy. Signals that challenge existing assumptions are softened or reframed, not out of malice, but to avoid destabilising decision processes that rely on clarity.

Decision-making becomes more cautious and more centralised. As ambiguity increases, authority is pulled upward in search of certainty and protection. Decisions that could previously be made locally are escalated, not because of incompetence, but because the cost of being wrong feels higher when outcomes are harder to predict.

Action fragments. Teams hesitate, wait for alignment, or pursue parallel interpretations of what matters. Accountability becomes diffuse as the organisation attempts to reconcile speed with control. Work continues, but momentum weakens.

At the same time, cognitive load increases across the organisation. Individuals are asked to absorb more information, manage greater uncertainty, and reconcile competing signals, often without changes to the structures that shape how decisions are made. Stress rises, autonomy erodes, and capability is consumed by coordination rather than creation.

These effects are often interpreted as cultural concerns, leadership gaps, or engagement problems. In reality, they are systemic responses to operating under conditions the organisation was not designed for.

The organisation does not stop functioning. It adapts defensively, expending increasing effort to maintain internal stability while becoming less responsive to the environment that surrounds it.

Why the usual diagnoses fall short

Faced with these effects, organisations rarely conclude that their underlying design assumptions are no longer fit for purpose. Instead, the symptoms are interpreted through more familiar lenses.

The problem is not a lack of effort or intent. It is a misreading of what disruption has made visible.

Slower decision-making is treated as a leadership issue. Fragmented action is attributed to poor execution. Distorted information flows are framed as communication failures. Rising stress and disengagement are addressed as cultural or capability problems. Each diagnosis makes sense when viewed in isolation.

Common responses follow. Leaders are asked to be more decisive. Processes are tightened to restore control. New technologies are introduced to increase speed and visibility. Change initiatives are launched to realign behaviour. These interventions are often well-intentioned and competently delivered.

The difficulty is not that these responses are irrational, but that they are grounded in assumptions that no longer hold. They presume an environment where clarity can be restored, variability reduced, and equilibrium re-established. Under persistent disruption, those conditions are increasingly absent.

As a result, interventions aimed at improving performance can amplify the very effects they are intended to resolve. Efforts to centralise control slow response. Attempts to enforce consistency reduce sensitivity to change. Technologies designed to optimise throughput increase cognitive load rather than insight.

The organisation responds by working harder at the wrong level. Energy is directed toward correcting behaviour and reinforcing processes, while the underlying mismatch between organisational design and environmental reality remains unaddressed.

The problem is not a lack of effort or intent. It is a misreading of what disruption has made visible.

Rethinking where intelligence resides

If disruption is no longer episodic but environmental, and if many organisational difficulties arise from a mismatch between design and conditions, then the question of intelligence must be reconsidered.

In most organisations, intelligence is still implicitly treated as something that resides in individuals, the leaders and specialists. Sense-making is concentrated, decisions are escalated and action is coordinated through hierarchy. This logic assumes that insight can be gathered, interpreted, and deployed from the centre with sufficient speed and accuracy.

Under persistent disruption, that assumption becomes increasingly fragile. No individual or small group can reliably interpret fast-moving, ambiguous conditions on behalf of the whole organisation. Signals emerge locally, consequences unfold unevenly, and understanding is distributed across roles, teams, and contexts.

What becomes visible is not a shortage of intelligence, but a limitation in how it is organised. The organisation struggles not because people lack insight, but because the system constrains how insight is surfaced, combined and acted upon.

This points to a deeper implication: if organisations are to function effectively under persistent disruption, intelligence cannot be treated solely as an individual capability or leadership trait. It must be understood as a property of the organisation itself, shaped by how sensing, decision-making, and action are structured.

What it would mean to design for that kind of intelligence, and what trade-offs it entails, remains an open question.

What remains unresolved

Organisations typically inherited a design that made sense in a more predictable world. This organisational design was predicated on efficiency, scale, and control. It delivered extraordinary results. It was not a mistake.

What disruption now exposes is the limit of this design.

As the environment becomes less predictable, the organisation’s ability to sense, decide, and act coherently is increasingly constrained by assumptions it can no longer safely rely on. Effort intensifies, intelligence accumulates, and technology advances, yet the organisation’s responsiveness continues to degrade.

This creates a quiet paradox. Organisations become more capable in absolute terms while becoming less able to use that capability effectively. The gap between what people know and what the organisation can do with that knowledge widens.

The challenge is not simply one of adaptation, nor is it reducible to leadership, culture or technology. It is a question of how organisations are conceived and designed in a world where disruption is not an interruption, but the prevailing condition.

What follows from that recognition is still emerging. What is clear is that many of the assumptions that once underpinned organisational design can no longer be taken for granted.