Hello, I’m Chris Parsons, and welcome to Nobody DesignedThis.

This is the introduction to a year-long series about aquestion that has followed me through nearly three decades in largeorganisations: why do they so often behave in ways almost nobody intended?

Why do decisions move upwards when authority has supposedlybeen delegated? Why does bureaucracy grow despite repeated attempts to reduceit? Why do transformation programmes promise renewal, yet leave the underlyingconditions unchanged?

The title is deliberate. Nobody Designed This doesnot mean organisations lack structures, strategies or plans. It means few weredesigned as coherent systems. They evolved through accumulated decisions,inherited processes, political compromises, regulation, technology and local adaptation.

A control was introduced after something went wrong. Atemporary group became permanent. A new system was layered over an old process.Each decision may have made sense at the time. Together, they created somethingnobody consciously designed.

That is the central idea. Organisations are not machineswaiting to be repaired by a new structure, process, technology or instruction.They are living systems shaped by history, incentives, relationships, habitsand constraints. Change the formal organisation and the lived organisationadapts.

My interest in this has been shaped by 17 years in the RoyalAir Force, 11 years in the NHS, and work as an IPA Gateway Reviewer on majorgovernment projects in the UK and New Zealand. Across those settings, the samepatterns recur: decisions escalate, risk becomes paperwork, measures drift frompurpose, lessons are forgotten, and transformation delivers the new withoutretiring the old.

These patterns are rarely explained by incompetence or badintent. Accountability matters, but blame alone does not explain why the same behaviourssurvive changes of leader, structure and strategy. To understand that, we needto examine the conditions that shape behaviour.

Over the next year, Nobody Designed This will developthrough 52 chapters in four connected parts. The Science of Organisationswill explore gravity, drift, friction, complexity, memory, bureaucracy andtransformation debt. The Future Executive will ask what leadershiprequires in organisations shaped by uncertainty, interdependence and artificialintelligence. Designing Public Institutions will consider legitimacy,trust, accountability and adaptability. The Adaptive Organisation will askhow organisations can learn continuously rather than repeatedly transform.

This is not a management handbook offering a simple formula.Large organisations need hierarchy, standards, coordination and control. Publicinstitutions need assurance and accountability. The question is whether these remainconnected to purpose, and whether the organisation can recognise when somethingthat once helped has begun to hinder.

I want the series to be accessible to anyone who has workedinside a large organisation and wondered why change is so hard: waiting weeksfor an authorised decision, entering the same information into several systems,watching a workaround become permanent, or seeing a lesson documented and forgotten.

The aim is to provide language and models that help us seethese experiences differently. Once we can see a pattern, we can question it.Once we can name a force, we can design around it. And once we understand howtoday’s organisation emerged, we have a better chance of changing it withoutrecreating the same problems.

So this is the starting point: organisations behave likesystems, not machines. If that is true, much of what we have been taught aboutchanging them may need to be reconsidered.

Welcome to Nobody Designed This.

Read the full series, released weekly here: https://lnkd.in/p/eBiUhxj3