It Made Sense at the Time

If you ever want to see what happens when hundreds of years of individually reasonable decisions accumulate in one place, spend a little time trying to explain Pennsylvania local government.

We have 67 counties and more than 2,500 municipalities. Cities, boroughs and townships. School districts. Authorities. Elected row officers. Different responsibilities sitting at different and occasionally overlapping levels of government, sometimes in ways that make perfect sense once you understand the history – and occasionally in ways that require a flowchart, a history lesson and possibly a stiff drink to explain.

Nobody sat down with a blank sheet of paper and designed all of this. It accumulated.

Communities formed governments to meet the needs of their time. Responsibilities were assigned where they made sense. New structures were created to solve new problems. Laws changed. Populations shifted. Technology changed what was possible. One perfectly reasonable decision followed another.

And here we are.

If we were designing Pennsylvania local government from scratch today, would we design it exactly this way?

No.

I'll leave the considerably more dangerous question of what we would design for another day.

But it's worth asking the same question closer to home:

If we were designing our organizations for what we need today, would we design them exactly the way they are now?

They may not have had a few hundred years to get there, but they've accumulated too – one perfectly reasonable decision at a time.

How did we get here?

Someone leaves, so another employee picks up part of the job.

A new program needs a home, so it lands with the department that seems like the closest fit.

A problem comes up, so we add an approval.

Communication isn't working, so we add a meeting.

Someone develops a workaround for a clunky process.

A particularly capable employee turns out to be good at something that isn't really part of their job, so they keep doing it.

A committee continues long after anyone remembers what it was originally created to accomplish.

Each decision may make perfect sense in the moment. That's how organizational weirdness gets built. Today's reasonable accommodation becomes tomorrow's standard operating procedure – even when the circumstances that made it reasonable have long since disappeared.

Do something once and it's a solution. Do it long enough and it's simply how things work. Eventually, we may not even recognize that there's anything unusual about it.

Until someone new comes in, looks around and says: Wait. You do what?

The things we stop seeing

That's one of the risks of knowing an organization well.

Something is strange. Then it's familiar. Then it's normal. Eventually, it's almost invisible.

We stop wondering why the report goes to that person. We stop questioning why two departments have completely different processes for essentially the same thing. We know that this form gets emailed to that person, who enters it into this spreadsheet, which someone else uses to update another system.

We know how it works. And knowing how it works can make it surprisingly difficult to actually see how it works.

That's why fresh eyes can be so useful. A new employee asks why. A colleague from another department says, "Wait, you have to do that?" A resident or customer can't figure out a process everyone inside the organization thinks is perfectly clear.

Our instinct is often to explain, because sometimes there's a very good explanation. History matters. Context matters. Constraints matter.

But leadership curiosity also means being willing to hear the question before we rush to defend the answer. Sometimes someone else can see what familiarity has made invisible to us.

Huh. Why DO we do it that way?

That's a question worth staying with for a minute, because part of leading is continuing to notice.

You don't have to redesign everything

From here, it would be easy to prescribe an organizational redesign exercise. Put away the org chart. Start with a blank sheet of paper. Ask what you're actually trying to accomplish and build the perfect organization around it.

There are moments when that kind of thinking is valuable.

Most leaders, however, aren't sitting around with a blank sheet of paper and unlimited authority to rebuild their organizations. And most Tuesdays aren't particularly conducive to it anyway. There are employees who need answers, residents or customers who need help, deadlines approaching and approximately 47 things that all became urgent at the same time.

So start smaller. Pick one thing you've stopped seeing.

A meeting.

An approval.

A reporting relationship.

A responsibility that somehow landed with one person.

A process that requires six steps when nobody can quite explain why.

And get curious about it. Why do we do it this way?

Then: Does the reason we started doing it still apply?

And finally: Knowing what we know today, would we choose to do it this way again?

The answer might be yes. Maybe the seemingly strange arrangement works exceptionally well. Maybe changing it would create more problems than it solves. Maybe there are constraints that aren't obvious until you start asking questions.

That's okay. What matters is recognizing which parts of the way we work we've actively chosen and which ones we've simply inherited.

Keep noticing

There will also be bigger moments when we have an opportunity to step back. A vacancy. A new strategic plan. A budget challenge. New technology. Organizational growth. A leadership transition.

Those moments give us an opening to ask the bigger question: What are we actually trying to accomplish?

Then we can look at what we've accumulated and decide what still helps us get there.

But we don't have to wait for a reorganization to lead with intention. We can listen a little more carefully when the new employee asks the question everyone else stopped asking years ago. We can notice when it takes five minutes to explain something that should take thirty seconds. We can catch ourselves saying, "That's just how it works." We can recognize when the temporary solution we're creating today is in danger of becoming part of the organizational architecture tomorrow.

Organizations will always accumulate. We solve problems. We adapt. We make the best decision we can with the people, resources and information available to us.

Leadership means remaining curious enough that what we've grown accustomed to doesn't become invisible.

Every once in a while, look at something familiar and ask: Would we choose this today?

You might decide you would.

But at least this time, it will be a choice.