Walk into any government office, and you’ll immediately notice that the way things work there is quite different. For the most part, it doesn’t make any logical sense. There are rules, procedures, timelines, and exceptions that add no value to the fundamental purpose of this agency’s existence.
And yet, you’ll find yourself showing up at this office, standing in a queue, and by the time you reach the window to speak with the service personnel, it’s time for lunch, or worse, they throw a problem at you that cannot be solved in that instant. Guess what, you will have to come back another day.
Sure, you could have gotten everything from the website — if only it worked, or had all the information.
People may call it corruption or bureaucracy — I think it’s institutional inertia.
The fall of the Ming Dynasty in China best illustrates this.
During the 17th century, the Ming Dynasty faced an existential external threat from well-organized Manchu forces massing on its northern borders.
To survive, the regime desperately needed to marshal its resources, raise tax revenues, and rebuild its professional army. But the government was paralyzed by institutional inertia and its own comfortable relationships with the societal elites who would have had to bear the new tax burden.
Because disengaged emperors found it easier to “let sleeping dogs lie” than to confront their own internal stakeholders, the state failed to adapt to the changing circumstances, leading directly to the dynasty’s collapse.
The Ming court isn’t as distant as it sounds.
When nobody names what is actually happening, the costs compound at every level, creating a modern-day “Emperor’s New Clothes” scenario in which an illusion of success masks impending disaster. And in my experience, teams are most vulnerable to falling into an “illusion of agreement” because their members are too afraid of interpersonal conflict to challenge the status quo — they waste their energy managing their social standing rather than actually solving problems.
Instead of addressing root causes, the team relies on counterproductive workarounds.
I think this is where leadership makes a difference — instead of viewing employees as subjects to be controlled through intimidation and treating failure as a weapon to punish them, leaders must see the people below them as valued contributors with crucial knowledge and insight.
If a leader stops seeing pushback as a threat to their ego and starts seeing skeptics and bad news as essential tools for improving decision-making, they completely dismantle the culture of fear that causes companies to fail from within.
The sleeping dogs are already awake. Most leaders just haven’t looked down yet.