Monday, 28 September 2026

When a major public initiative or large-scale infrastructure project begins to stall, institutional leadership almost always defaults to the same playbook: tighten the grip. Executive committees create extra approval gates, mandate high-frequency status tracking, dispatch compliance teams and trim authorisation limits.

It feels rigorous and creates the illusion of oversight, but decades of research into complex organisational behavior demonstrate that this tightening is precisely what pushes a struggling program into total paralysis.

Dr. Mike Rollo, a former Chief Risk Officer with more than four decades in mega-project infrastructure, has spent years examining why capable leaders regularly founder under pressure. His core conclusion challenges conventional corporate doctrine: the more volatile an enterprise becomes, the less effectively it can be managed like a factory. Long-term viability depends on empowering battle-tested professionals to adapt as real-time conditions shift.

Two ways to run an organisation

The distinction Rollo made builds on a classic study by Burns and Stalker, who categorised corporate systems into two contrasting operational models: mechanistic system and organic system. A mechanistic system is built for stability, it relies on precise roles, formal procedures and authority that flows from the top down. An organic system is built for change, it relies on flexibility, lateral communication and authority that shifts to wherever the relevant expertise sits.

Neither framework is inherently superior, it depends on the underlying work and the environment. A manufacturing operation making the same product at scale can and should be run mechanistically, because success there is about doing a known thing efficiently and cheaply. Rules and standardisation are exactly what the situation calls for.

Contrast that environment with mobile healthcare professionals conducting home visits. As Rollo puts it, the worker cannot predict what they will find when they arrive. If the response is governed by a mechanistic approach, such as requiring forms, head-office approval and formal authority to act, “serious things can happen” while the paperwork catches up. In an organic approach, “you use your skills and experience to make decisions on the spot”. The environment is unpredictable, so the management system has to be too.

This maps almost exactly onto one of the most widely used tools in modern management. In their Harvard Business Review framework for decision making, David Snowden and Mary Boone distinguish complicated problems, where cause and effect can be worked out by experts and best practice applies, from complex ones, where the relationship between cause and effect only becomes clear in hindsight. Complicated work rewards analysis and standard procedure. Complex work rewards probing, listening and letting workable answers emerge. Treating a complex situation as though it were merely complicated, by reaching for more rules, is a recipe for failure.

The paradox of control

This is where the central idea earns its name. “The more you try to control something, the less control you have,” Rollo argues. In a complex environment, imposing a mechanistic grip does not deliver command. It removes it.

The construction industry offers a familiar illustration. When a project runs over budget, the standard management response is to reduce delegations, micromanage, send in auditors and require copious reports. Every one of those moves feels like reasserting control. In practice, Rollo observes, they make the problem worse. They consume the attention of the people closest to the work and slow the very decisions that could steady the program. What actually helps is close to the opposite: giving experienced managers more authority and better tools to deal with the issues, and then getting out of their way.

The pattern is not confined to construction. During the COVID-19 pandemic, health systems that leaned heavily on centralised rules and approvals struggled to respond to a situation that was changing by the day. Capacity that had been built at speed sometimes sat unused because the bureaucracy could not move as fast as the crisis. The lesson is not that rules are bad. It is that a mechanistic response to a complex, fast moving problem tends to lose control precisely when control matters most.

Letting go is not the same as losing control

None of this is an argument for removing structure. The organic approach is often caricatured as the absence of rules, and that caricature is dangerous. Rollo is emphatic about the caveat. “You cannot have untrained or inexperienced people in a self managing environment,” he warns. Authority released to people who lack the experience, the communication channels or the trust to use it well does not produce agility, it produces chaos.

Rollo’s research found that organic management still requires clear explicit systems, meaning documented delegations, an understood structure and clear procedures. What changes is the accompanying set of implicit systems, meaning the culture, communication, trust and knowledge sharing that let people act well without waiting for instruction. Both of them matter, the difference is that people are valued for their experience rather than their rank. As Rollo puts it, “the person who self organises will be the most experienced, not necessarily the most senior”.

Why this matters more now

If the organic imperative has always been true for complex work, it is becoming harder to ignore. “Pace drives complexity, which opens cracks in organisations,” Rollo notes. The speed at which information moves has risen sharply, first with connected devices and now with artificial intelligence, and that acceleration puts organisations under a kind of stress they were not designed to absorb.

Speed is not a neutral force. When an organisation runs faster and its explicit systems are weak, delegations blur, structures wobble and it stops being clear who is authorised to decide what. The faster things move, the more an organisation leans on its implicit systems, on whether people trust each other, communicate openly and share what they know. Organisations with strong implicit foundations can absorb complexity and keep moving. Those without them find that pace turns small cracks into fractures.

What organic management asks of leaders

Transitioning from bureaucratic control to adaptive governance requires deliberate shifts in managerial behavior:

• Diagnose the environment before choosing the approach: Ask honestly whether the work in front of you is complicated, where analysis and procedure will serve, or complex, where no amount of process will substitute for experienced judgement on the ground.
• Invest in the implicit systems, not only the explicit ones: Trust, communication and knowledge sharing are not soft extras. In complex, fast moving work they are the load bearing structure, and they take deliberate effort to build.
• Let authority follow expertise: Empower experienced people to step outside the usual chain of command when complexity demands it, and accept that the right person to lead a given decision may not be the most senior one in the room.
• Resist the reflex to tighten when a program slips: Before adding controls, ask whether the problem is a lack of control or a lack of room. More often than managers expect, capable people need tools and space, not supervision.

The organic imperative is not a licence to abandon discipline. It is a more demanding form of it, one that asks leaders to hold their nerve, trust the people they have trained, and recognise that in complex work the surest way to lose control is to grasp for it too hard.

About the Author

Paul Vorbach is the Managing Director of AcademyGlobal, a Sydney-based capability development firm established in 2004 and the CIPS Centre of Excellence for ANZ. Since 2005, Paul has trained contract management, procurement and supply chain professionals across over twenty centuries in five continents. He is Vice President of the Institute of Strategic Risk Management (ISRM) ANZ, Treasurer of the Society for Risk Analysis (SRA) ANZ, and Adjunct Faculty at the Australian Graduate School of Management (AGSM) at the University of New South Wales.

AcademyGlobal partners with public sector, private sector, and not-for-profit organisations to build the capability that underpins sustainable delivery performance, and is the Chartered Institute of Procurement and Supply (CIPS) Centre of Excellence for Australia, New Zealand and Asia.