You're reading this because you care about strategy, governance, and culture. You have frameworks. You have KPIs. You hold quarterly board meetings to discuss "organizational capabilities" and "cultural transformation."
Let me tell you what's actually happening while you're having those discussions.
The Meeting That Never Happened
Picture your last strategy session. You and eleven other executives around a mahogany table, discussing "the organization's strategic pivot." You leave feeling aligned. The strategy is clear. It will be cascaded down.
But here's what actually occurred: Twelve human mammals with roughly 86 billion neurons each, shaped by different childhoods, carrying different mortgages, worried about various health issues, sat in a room. The CMO was thinking about her daughter's college tuition while nodding at the revenue projections. The CFO, whose wife just got diagnosed with depression, agreed to an aggressive growth strategy he would have fought six months ago. The VP of Engineering, who just got passed over for promotion, mentally checked out after minute fifteen.
These twelve distracted primates then produced sounds and marks on paper that they call "the strategy." This document, this pattern of ink on dead trees or pixels on screens, is somehow supposed to coordinate the actions of 10,000 other distracted primates, each dealing with their own fears, ambitions, and gastrointestinal issues.
You call this "strategic alignment."
Let's call it what it is: a collective hallucination.
The Tools That Don't Work
Strategy: The Company That Doesn't Exist
When you say "Google decided to pivot to AI," what actually happened? There is no Google. There's no entity that "decided" anything. There's a building in Mountain View where some humans in expensive suits had conversations. These conversations influenced other discussions, which in turn influenced even more conversations, rippling out through 180,000 individual nervous systems, each processing these signals through its own perceptual filters, trauma histories, and blood sugar levels.
By the time this "decision" reaches a programmer in Zurich, it has transformed into a Jira ticket about optimizing a machine learning pipeline. She doesn't experience "Google's strategic pivot." She experiences her manager, Brad, being more annoying than usual about deployment schedules. Brad doesn't experience strategy either - he experiences pressure from his skip-level, who mentioned "AI velocity" four times in their last one-on-one.
This is your strategy: millions of individual reactions to local stimuli, creating patterns you retroactively label as "strategic behavior."
Governance: or, Dominance Theater
Let's examine your board meeting more closely. You present to "the board" as if it's an entity with wisdom and judgment. But watch what actually happens:
Janet, who sits on six boards, is pattern-matching your situation to something she half-remembers from a different company in a different industry five years ago.
Robert, the retired CEO, is performing the role of "wise elder" because that's his role in this theatrical production.
Sarah, the activist investor's representative, is calculating how each decision affects the fund's IRR, not your company's long-term health.
Michael is checking his phone under the table because his other portfolio company just imploded.
These four disconnected attention streams somehow produce "board oversight." You implement their "guidance," which is really just the verbal output of four stressed humans trying to avoid lawsuits while maintaining their reputations.
When Zajac and Westphal found that excessive board monitoring decreased performance, they were documenting something profound: the watchers and the watched are all just frightened humans pretending to know what they're doing. Add more watching, and you just add more fear.
Culture: Ghosts in the Machine
You spend millions on "culture transformation." You hire consultants who measure your "cultural dimensions" and produce heat maps showing where "the culture" needs to change.
But culture isn't a thing that exists. Right now, as you read this, there is no culture anywhere in your building. There are just thousands of humans making millions of micro-decisions based on what they think will keep them safe, paid, and respected.
When Sarah in accounting decides not to flag that questionable expense report, she's not being influenced by "the culture." She's remembering that Jim got fired after raising too many issues. When Marcus in sales inflates his pipeline, he's not expressing "cultural values." He's trying to avoid the shame of missing quota in front of his peers.
Your culture is nothing more than the aggregate of these fear-based calculations. The Grennan study didn't find that governance "eroded culture" - it found that when you add more surveillance, frightened humans make different fear-based calculations.
Incentives: The Survival Game
You design incentive systems as if humans were robots awaiting programming. "If we reward X, we'll get more X." But watch what actually happens:
You implement pay-for-performance tied to customer satisfaction scores. Within six months, your call center workers have figured out seventeen ways to game the metric. They're not being dishonest - they're being human. Their mortgage payments depend on those scores. Their children's healthcare depends on those scores. So they optimize for the scores, not for customer satisfaction.
The Akinyele experiment showed this isn't a bug - it's the core feature. Every incentive system is immediately processed through thousands of individual survival algorithms, each human calculating: "What story do I need to tell to get rewarded and avoid punishment?"
You think you're aligning incentives with strategy. You're actually creating a complex game where everyone pretends to care about what you measure while actually caring about their own psychological and economic survival.
The Systemic Impossibilities
Information Compression: The Big Lie
Here's the terrifying mathematics of your situation. Your organization contains approximately 10,000 humans × 86 billion neurons × thousands of synaptic connections × continuous state changes. The information complexity is greater than the number of atoms in the observable universe.
Your response? A 112-slide PowerPoint deck.
Strategy compresses this impossible complexity into "focus on customer excellence." But the map is not the territory - the strategic plan is not the billions of daily microdecisions.
Governance tries to compress decision-making by creating hierarchical levels and boundaries. But these rigid structures cannot anticipate that Johnson in procurement is going through a divorce and will approve anything just to get through his day, or that Danielle in R&D had an insight in the shower that makes the entire product roadmap obsolete.
Culture tries to create heuristics for the infinite decision space. But each human interprets these heuristics through their own trauma, their own dreams, their own Saturday morning mood after too much wine on Friday night.
Incentives try to align these incomprehensible information streams. Still, they can only reward what can be measured, and measurement is always a lie about what actually creates value.
The Measurement Hallucination
Your dashboards are lying to you. Every metric is a fiction agreed upon by people too tired to argue about methodology.
"Employee engagement" is the average of how thousands of humans felt during the fifteen minutes they spent clicking through a survey while thinking about lunch. "Customer satisfaction" is a number generated by people who just want the survey to end. "Strategic alignment" is measured by asking people to rate their agreement with statements they don't understand about a strategy they've never read.
You then use these fictional numbers to make real decisions affecting real humans. It's like navigating by a map drawn by a blindfolded child - except you're pretending the child has perfect vision.
The Recursive Nightmare
Here's where it gets truly vertiginous. Your strategic plans influence governance structures, which shape cultural norms, which determine incentive systems, which affect individual behavior, which creates emergent patterns that you measure and interpret as organizational performance, which informs new strategic plans.
Each cycle involves massive information loss, interpretation errors, and willful blindness. It's like playing telephone with 10,000 people where each person is simultaneously the speaker and the listener, and everyone is pretending they understand the message.
An employee experiences your new "transformation initiative" as an annoying Monday morning email. They adjust their behavior slightly - not toward your strategic vision, but toward what they think will make their manager stop bothering them. Multiply this by 10,000. The pattern that emerges looks nothing like what you intended, but you'll measure it, put it in a dashboard, and make decisions based on it.
You're not leading an organization. You're watching patterns emerge from chaos and telling yourself a story about why they appeared.
The Primate Reality
The Self-Determination Joke
The research on Self-Determination Theory adds a cruel punchline. Humans need autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Your organizational tools systematically destroy all three.
Your strategy removes autonomy by dictating direction. Your governance extracts competence by second-guessing decisions. Your culture undermines relatedness by encouraging everyone to compete for survival. Your incentives turn colleagues into threats.
Then you wonder why "engagement" is low. Engagement with what? With the fiction that they're part of something meaningful rather than just trying to pay rent?
The Political Reality
Worse, every organizational tool is a weapon in a primate dominance game. When the CEO pushes for a new strategy, she's not maximizing shareholder value - she's maximizing her own neurochemical rewards: status, safety, mating opportunities (yes, even that).
When the board implements new governance, they're not ensuring oversight - they're performing elaborate dominance rituals that maintain their position in the troop hierarchy while avoiding the kinds of failures that would threaten their inclusion in other troops (boards).
Campbell's finding about cultural homogeneity reducing the need for equity incentives? That's not efficiency. That's what happens when the dominant coalition has successfully programmed everyone else to self-police according to the coalition's interests. It's behavioral conditioning so complete that you don't even need explicit rewards anymore.
The Ultimate Mindfuck
Here's the final twist that should leave you staring at the ceiling at 3 AM:
Everything I've just told you is accurate, and it changes nothing.
Tomorrow you'll still have a strategy meeting. You'll still talk about "the organization" as if it exists. You'll still pretend that governance governs, that culture can be managed, that incentives align behavior. Not because you're stupid, but because the alternative is paralysis.
We cannot coordinate 10,000 humans without these useful fictions. We cannot even discuss what we're doing without reification. The very language forces us into these illusions - we say "Apple innovates" because saying "thousands of individual humans at various locations, each responding to local stimuli and personal motivations, create patterns of behavior that sometimes result in new products" is impossible.
You're trapped in a game where everyone knows the rules are made up, but we all have to pretend they're real because the alternative is chaos. You're not a leader - you're an actor in an elaborate theater where everyone has forgotten it's a play.
So What Now?
After you've stared into the abyss of organizational reality, you still have to show up Monday morning. But maybe, just maybe, you'll show up differently.
Maybe you'll redesign that incentive system, remembering that it will be processed through 10,000 individual fear-and-hope algorithms. Maybe you'll craft that strategy knowing it's just a story that might influence other stories. Maybe you'll sit in that board meeting recognizing it as the anxiety-driven improvisational theater it really is.
The companies that survive aren't those with the best strategies, governance, or cultures. They're those where enough humans, enough of the time, happen to coordinate their individual survival behaviors in ways that accidentally create value. The successful executives aren't those who control organizations - they're those who recognize they're surfing chaos and have gotten good at telling stories about the patterns they see in the waves.
Welcome to organizational reality. Your strategic plan is an invocation. Your culture is a ghost story. Your governance is a ritual dance. Your incentives are a game everyone's pretending to play while actually playing a different game entirely.
Still want to talk about "organizational transformation"?
The author is an individual human pressing keys that create patterns of light on a screen, hoping these patterns will influence the neural states of other individual humans in ways that create the emergent pattern we call "understanding." Whether this will happen is entirely out of his control.