Sleepwalking

On what it costs an organization when its people stop growing

This essay is the second in The Reckoning; a companion to The Identity series.

The third Tuesday of the month. Quinn sits in the second-floor conference room while the Director of Finance works through the P&L. Her numbers are the best in the room — labor efficiency up, COGS holding, revenue six points up year over year. The Director pauses when he reaches her section. Her leader nods. The GM makes eye contact and says "Well done." Quinn says "Thank you," attributes the result to her team, and gives the context on the one variance. She says exactly what her leader hoped she would. Twenty minutes later she is back in her office with the door closed. She sits with the P&L on the desk in front of her and waits for something to arrive. Nothing does. Thirty seconds pass. She sighs deeply, opens her laptop, and moves to the next task.

I. The Field That Appears Healthy

In 1845, a single pathogen wiped out roughly a third of Ireland's food supply and triggered a famine that killed a million people and displaced a million more. The proximate cause was Phytophthora infestans: a water mold that devastated potato crops across the country. The actual cause was simpler and older; the entire agricultural system had been built around a single variety of potato. When something arrived that the crop was not prepared to handle, there was nothing else in the field.

That is a monoculture — dangerously optimized. High yield, low variation, zero resilience to that which it has not encountered yet.

I am reminded of this when I walk into an organization where everyone on the leadership team sounds the same. Same comfort with ambiguity — or lack of it. Same instinct under pressure. Same definition of a productive meeting, a promising hire, a sound response. Often from the same background. The numbers are solid. The culture feels stable, and yet, the organization has quietly lost that which would allow it to respond to something genuinely new.

Quinn is not the problem. Quinn is the yield. She is the crop the field has been consistently growing, because the field rewards exactly what she brings. The last essay was about how that happens. This one is about what you are left with once it has.

II. What the P&L Doesn't Capture

A question most performance management systems cannot answer: "Is this person growing?"

The distinction between performing and growing matters because a person can deliver excellent results for years while quietly plateauing — and the organization, reading the results, cannot see it. Quinn's numbers are good, as they have been for two years. What they do not reflect is that Quinn's thinking stopped moving eighteen months ago. The ideas she brings now are the ideas the role has always needed - competent, timely, safe - but they do not take anyone anywhere new.

Robert Kegan spent decades studying this and found adults plateau when their environment stops requiring more than they have already built. The growth stops not because the person has reached their ceiling but because the ceiling stopped moving. Once enough people in an organization plateau simultaneously, something shifts in the culture itself — away from the energy of people who are still figuring things out, toward the smoothness of people who already have. What feels like maturity, operates like stagnation.

The organization cannot see this in a performance review. The review asks what someone produced, not whether they are still developing. It asks what happened, not what is happening to the capacity of the person over time. This is a design flaw in how most organizations track talent, and most leaders have never been asked to fix it because nobody told them it was broken.

Worth naming what “broken” actually means here. The system is not malfunctioning — it is producing exactly what it was designed to produce. The problem is that what it produces is the floor, not the ceiling. Discretionary effort — the gap between what an employee must do to keep their job and what they are genuinely capable of giving when engaged — is where real organizational capacity lives. Quinn is delivering at the floor. Her ceiling is somewhere else, untouched, and nobody is asking about it, because she is delivering.

Leaders whose teams are performing acceptably may read that as reassurance. It should register as a challenge. Acceptable performance in a plateaued team is a slowly depleting asset. The numbers look the same. The capacity behind them is quietly shrinking. By the time the shrinkage shows up in the data, the hidden costs have been accumulating for years.

III. Five Things You Can Do Monday

The monoculture does not announce itself. You have to look for it. Here are five places to look and five things to do with what you find.

Ask a question you do not know the answer to. Not a test — an open-ended question about anything you are uncertain about, directed at someone on your team. Then watch. If the room goes quiet, if the eyes turn to you, if people wait for you to fill the silence, if nobody pushes back, if nobody adds to the question, that is a signal. A team that is growing argues with you, rattles your comfort, forces you to extend your thinking, catches you off guard. A plateaued team waits to be told, like a team of broken horses, in which the spirit has been buried, by years of cues and responses.

Pull the last six months of your one-on-ones and ask: "When did this person last bring me something I did not ask for?" An idea, a concern, an observation about something outside their lane. If the answer is "rarely," or "never," you have one of two problems: either they have stopped generating, or they have stopped trusting that bringing it to you is worth the risk. Figure out which it is.

Look at your last three hires. What did they have in common? What were the deciding factors? If reliability and composure kept showing up — implicitly or explicitly — as the primary criteria, you have been seeding the next generation of monoculture. Diversifying a culture does not require a new DEI initiative. It starts with hiring one person who thinks differently from everyone already in the room and then listening to what they say.

Find the person who used to disagree with you and stopped. Something shifted — a meeting where the pushback landed badly, a decision that went the other way too many times, an unspoken signal that dissent was not worth the cost. That person knows something you need to know, and the conversation where you go back and ask what changed is one of the more valuable ones you can have.

Change one meeting. Pick the one where everyone agrees, where the same people talk, where the outcome is known before it starts. Then bring in someone from outside the usual group. Ask for the counterargument before the proposal gets approved. Let the silence stand without filling it with your answer. Make it a standing feature rather than a one-time exercise. A single meeting where variation is expected changes the implicit rules about what is safe to say everywhere else.

IV. When the Pathogen Arrives

Every monoculture eventually meets the thing it cannot handle. The Irish potato farmers were efficient, not negligent. The famine was not caused by a failure to work hard. It was caused by a system with no redundancy, built over generations, that looked like success right up until it clearly was not.

Organizations face their equivalent regularly: a competitor who approaches the market differently; a generation of employees who want something the culture has never learned to offer; a guest or customer expectation that the operation is not designed to meet; a technology that makes a foundational skill set irrelevant. These are not rare catastrophes — they are the normal pace of change, and the organizations that navigate them are the ones where enough people are still growing, still thinking, still capable of being genuinely surprised and doing something useful with it.

That capacity must be built during the seasons when the numbers are strong, and the field looks healthy and there is no obvious reason to change anything. Which is exactly when it feels hardest to justify. If we wait to be prompted by crisis, it is too late. Famine ensues.

Behavioral economics has a name for why we still wait. Status quo bias — the well-documented tendency to prefer the current state of affairs even when change would produce better outcomes — operates powerfully in organizational decision-making. The cost of disrupting a functioning culture is immediate and visible: friction, uncertainty, time, resources (money). The cost of not disrupting it is deferred and invisible: a slowly depleting capacity that will not show up in the quarterly numbers until it is already years gone. The bias runs toward the known. The known, in this case, is a field that looks fine and is quietly losing its resilience.

Quinn's thirty seconds of silence in the office after the best P&L review of her career is an early signal. The field is uniform. The yield is excellent. The question is whether anyone with the authority to change the conditions is paying attention to signals that do not show up in the numbers.

Quinn moves to the next thing. Then the next. The work comes and she does it and the doing is clean and reliable and exactly what the role asks for. Soon, it will be the third Tuesday again. She will sit in the same chair and the numbers will be good and the GM will say, "Well done." She is the most reliable crop in the field. She has been for two years. She will be for as long as the field keeps asking only for this and nothing more.

The question worth sitting with:

“When did someone on your team last genuinely surprise you — and what did you do with it?”

~~~

Further Reading

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas — Antifragile (2012).

Page, Scott — The Difference (2007).

Kegan, Robert and Lahey, Lisa — Immunity to Change (2009).

Senge, Peter — The Fifth Discipline (1990).

Edmondson, Amy — The Fearless Organization (2018).

Gladwell, Malcolm — The Tipping Point (2000).

Samuelson, W. & Zeckhauser, R. — Status Quo Bias in Decision Making (1988).