Disclaimer: This series is inspired, among other things, by the findings of the “Loneliness at Work” study prepared by Symetria. All interpretations and conclusions are the author’s own and do not represent the official position of the report’s authors or of any organization. The article does not refer to any specific company or professional situation. It describes systemic mechanisms typical of complex organizations.
Today’s guest is Dr Aga (Agnieszka) Szóstek, author of Umami Strategy and Become the Leader You Want to Be!, and of the novel The Invisible Cage (you can order that latest book here). It is a psychological thriller from the corporate world, showing that the cages that hold the hardest are the ones you cannot see at all.
Day to day she helps people and companies work better through wise strategy and conscious leadership.
Transformations rarely start from chaos. They start from a shift in rhythm. Decisions that used to land at a predictable pace start being needed faster. At the same time, the structure in which those decisions are supposed to function remains designed for stability, not for change.
At the formal level, little changes:
- roles still exist
- processes are still described;
- committees still meet according to the calendar
The change happens deeper: it concerns the relation between responsibility and the possibility of influence. In this new rhythm, responsibility descends lower, closer to operations, while the ability to move the system remains scattered across many layers.
It is precisely in this place that decision loneliness appears: an experience that comes from the mismatch between the pace of expectations and the pace of the system. The “Loneliness at Work” report prepared by Symetria shows that a sense of isolation at work particularly often concerns people who carry responsibility and at the same time have no real influence on the conditions in which they have to act. Digital transformation amplifies this mechanism, because it increases the number of decisions faster than the organization can rebuild its structures.
The architecture of responsibility in a time of change
Large organizations enter transformation with an architecture worked out over years. Multi-level governance, separated responsibilities, and elaborate decision processes were meant to provide (and in many situations simply do provide, as intended) safety, control, and repeatability. In an environment of relative stability those assumptions worked.
The problem (read: the challenge, heh) appears when change becomes a permanent state. Decisions have to land more often, context changes faster - and information ages while it is in circulation. Reports from the Polish Agency for Enterprise Development on the digital transformation of companies (I link one, but I encourage you to leaf through the others) repeatedly point out that the barrier is not a lack of technology, but a lack of organizational capacity for fast and coherent decision-making.
Roles in motion and the lack of a stable foothold
This is especially visible in Product, Tech, and Design. These are the roles from which greater responsibility is expected today (rightly, by the way) for direction, business value, and coherence of experience. And at the same time: they often remain seated in structures that do not give them full decision autonomy - even within the competencies they already have.
Scopes change. Responsibilities are redefined. Processes are under reconstruction. Decisions land in places that themselves are in a transitional state.
Deloitte Poland publications on governance and organizational transformations describe this state as one of the key points of tension between the ambition of change and the capacity to realize it.
In such environments, decision loneliness comes from the lack of a stable structural foothold. The decision-maker has to act in conditions that have not yet been arranged.
Parallel goals and the cost of constant synchronization
On top of all this comes the parallelism of strategic goals. Innovation, cost reduction, improvement of operational efficiency, and the development of new products function side by side. Each of these directions is justified, but they are not arranged in a sequence of dependencies - often a natural one. Everything is pushed at once.
McKinsey, in publications devoted to transformations (here again: I link to one report, but I found at least four on this topic; they are worth looking for), notes that organizations acting in many directions at once start losing clarity of priorities. The cost does not appear immediately in financial results, only as a growing number of alignments, meetings, and dependencies that have to be synchronized by hand - in extreme cases: the cost of handling exceeds the cost of implementation, not to mention the profits. When an organization drifts in that kind of “meetingitis,” a miss on results can sometimes be predicted shortly after the goals for a given budget year have been defined.
In such a situation it is sometimes hard to sense the problem (especially in the early phase), because decisions are most often not blocked outright - they are simply slowed by the need to constantly reconcile contradictory expectations.
When every move requires confirmation from several sides, and none of them sees the full picture - we are left alone with that situation.
Signals of the system’s state
In practice this state shows up in small, repeatable situations. Meetings end with further arrangements (including: arranging the date of the next meeting - sic!) instead of a decision. Data require constant refinement. Priorities change depending on the department’s perspective. The effort put into coordination starts to dominate over actually moving the work. That is not real work.
The Supreme Audit Office, in reports on the management of complex IT programs and projects, describes a similar pattern in the public sector. Diffused responsibility, a multitude of stakeholders, and the lack of a single decision center lead to delays and overload, even with highly competent teams.
Under such operating conditions, decision loneliness is… everyday life.
Why organizations do not register this
Organizations do not ignore decision loneliness on purpose. In most cases they simply do not have the tools to see it. Management systems were designed to monitor actions and results, not to observe how decisions actually come into being and how much it costs to close them. That means the key tensions remain outside the field of view, even when they really affect the pace and quality of transformation.
Decisions are not treated as an object of management
In most organizations, projects, budgets, and resources are managed. Decisions are treated as something that “just happens” inside those frames. They have no life cycle of their own, no owner, and no quality metric. Since a decision is not a formal systemic entity, its cost is not visible either.
The system sees the results of decisions, not the process of making them
Reports show effects. They do not show the number of iterations, reversals, conditional approvals, and informal alignments that led to those effects (one artifact that can sometimes signal the phenomenon is, for example, the difference between the date a task was created and the dates of its original and actual implementation). Decision loneliness is born precisely in that invisible area between intention and realization.
Decision time is not counted as a cost
Delays in making decisions are rarely treated as a real cost of transformation. Time spent waiting, synchronizing, and refining does not land in budgets or schedules. As a result the system learns that slowing down is neutral as long as the project formally “is moving,” as long as the department that currently has it “pushes” the topic onward.
Responsibility is settled point by point, and it operates systemically
Units are assessed on the basis of their fragments of responsibility. Decisions, however, are born at the junction of many areas. When something comes apart, it is hard to point to the place where the cost is systemically created. Decision loneliness appears exactly where responsibility is dispersed and settlement is still individual.
The illusion of control covers the lack of agency
Governance structures, committees, and statuses create the impression that decisions are “taken care of.” In practice many of them circulate between levels with no possibility of closing. The system sees movement, so it assumes progress. It does not register the fact that the decision-maker remains alone with the responsibility, but without a real lever.
Decision loneliness does not generate an incident
Systems react to events. A budget overrun, a delayed go-live, an outage. Decision loneliness is a state, not an event - it does not trigger an alarm. It grows quietly until it starts affecting the pace and quality of transformation.
And at the very end: decision loneliness is information about the stage of transformation
Decision loneliness is a side effect of an architecture in which decisions pass through more points than the current governance model can handle. It appears most often in the transitional phase of transformation, when the organization starts operating to a new operational rhythm, but the decision mechanisms are still anchored in the previous model.
At this stage, responsibility has already been shifted down the structure. Teams and roles are to deliver faster, react more often, and take on a greater weight of decisions. At the same time the key authorities, closing criteria, and approval paths still function according to the old logic. The system operates in two times at once (to be precise: there are frameworks that coordinate many timelines, but here we are talking outright about timelines in conflict with each other, competing for the same resource).
In the transitional phase, decision loneliness serves as a warning signal. It informs that transformation has left the stage of declarations and tools and entered the area of a real change of responsibility (which is, as a rule, good news). It shows the places where the operational pace has outrun the system’s capacity to make and close decisions.
Only in the stabilization phase does this tension start to fade. Not because there are fewer decisions - simply their architecture is adjusted to the new way of working. Responsibility and agency synchronize again. Until that moment, decision loneliness remains a readable (though unfortunately: often unmeasurable by the system and exclusively personal) indicator that the organization is still in motion, and that transformation has not yet reached a state of equilibrium.
Comment from Aga (Agnieszka) Szóstek
Status quo, resistance, and the fight for power
As Michał wrote above, the process of transformation is not only a story about strategy, structures, and implementation plans. It is, in its essence, a story about resistance - a quiet but powerful force that starts whenever an organization approaches real change. Resistance is not the voice of reason, though it often impersonates it. It is a defense mechanism of a system that over the years has learned to operate in a certain way and does not want to risk losing a known order. Steven Pressfield, in The War of Art, repeats that resistance is impersonal and cunning, that it takes the form of excessive analyses, meetings without decisions, and a seeming professionalism whose only real job is to keep everything exactly as it is.
Resistance is invariably helped by the status quo, which in organizations functions like an invisible social contract. The status quo does not have to be good or effective; it is enough that it is familiar. In the name of stability, organizations learn not to ask hard questions and not to challenge worn narratives. Transformation violates collective comfort, because it proposes a new story, and that story does not promise peace (which usually terrifies) but a new meaning (which usually awakens fear).
Why? Because a change of the status quo is most often a fight for power: not necessarily formal. It is about who, in the new arrangement, will define reality. Those who built their position in the old order defend it, often under slogans of care for the organization and its people. That is why change never starts from widespread agreement. It starts from someone who has the courage to say “let’s do this differently” and to hold, even though resistance will still whisper for a long time that they should go back to the old tracks.
If you want to be such a person, you will undoubtedly experience the tension between responsibility and a real possibility of influence. Mid- and senior-level leaders more and more often answer for decisions whose frames were set somewhere else. It is precisely here that resistance becomes particularly insidious: the organization expects courage and results, while at the same time limiting the space for actual change and leading to decision loneliness.
Such loneliness is not merely an abstract notion from books on leadership. It has a concrete face, emotions, and consequences. It is from this experience: from the suspension between responsibility and influence, loyalty to the system and loyalty to oneself, that my novel The Invisible Cage was born. It is a story that carries the mechanisms of status quo, resistance, and the fight for leadership from the level of theory and metaphors into the everyday of organizational decisions, meetings, and compromises.
Roma, the main character, gets a promotion that from the outside looks like a dream come true. In practice it turns out to be an entry into a system of invisible dependencies, expectations, and rules that nobody wrote down, but that everybody enforces. The higher she is, the more clearly she sees how little real possibility of change she has. Every decision costs something: relationships, peace, a sense of meaning. Every attempt to break out of the logic of the status quo raises a resistance that does not shout, but coolly reminds her “how things are done here.”
At the end I would like to share with you a poem from a still unpublished volume of corpo-poetry, that is, diaries of efficient suffering.
Reorganization
Reorganization is coming,
like a comet announcing a better tomorrow.
Big words fall
about synergy, flexibility
and “new opportunities.”
The old structures were, after all,
too “rigid,”
as if they were to blame
that everything lasted so long.
Now the reporting lines are to flow
like a river, faster, smoother, more effectively.
From tomorrow we will take off at a gallop,
because someone moved our names
two squares to the left.
And at last that day
arrives
and we return to our desks,
waiting for the change
to start working as well
as all the previous ones.