Life as We Know it

Designing Culture:

"Living, working systems come with mission critical, primary objectives built in.
First comes maintaining the status quo, or the inertia of doing the same thing the same way unless acted on from outside.
Second in priority is system growth.
Third, and only in the more efficient system does it ever occupy so high a priority, is the reason the system was formed in the first place.
Corporate cultures, teams, work processes, and most any system you care to imagine all seek these primary objectives."

(...you could follow the money-trail, or simply meditate on why (most) buildings don't fall down...jim.)

"How do we change the current situation?
As well understood as the situation is, and for all the description of the outcome sought, the real hidden problem is the lack of a plan to get from one system state to another. Mistaking data about the problem for information about the solution is, as always, part of what’s wrong.
So too is the inertia of the status quo all systems seek to maintain. The paralysis by analysis endemic to the information age is not an information age problem, but one of data processing as sole corrective step.
In processing data about the system, you find yourself part of the system. And quickly find yourself an expert in the assumptions which make the problems seem unchanging and unchangeable.
With information work, like the schoolgirl trying to spell the word banana, success lies not so much in the processing but in knowing when to stop."