Once it becomes clear that organisations have hidden dynamics running underneath their stated missions, a predictable response follows. The organisation sets up a programme. There are yoga classes. Volunteering days. Workshops on vulnerability. Staff are invited to bring their whole selves to work.
This is well-intentioned, and sometimes people have a good afternoon. It is also a trap. The gap between a stated mission and the actual dynamics of an organisation is not the kind of gap that closes because people are encouraged to journal about their feelings in a public session. The interventions that claim to address the gap often turn out to be the clearest evidence of it.
The reason is that the activities being performed are proxies, not the thing itself. What would actually help, if one wanted to bring hidden material into workable view, is genuinely safe conditions for doing so. Safety in this sense is not the presence of nice furniture and snacks. It is the absence of retribution, the presence of people who can hold difficult material without reacting, and a structural setup in which the person who says an uncomfortable thing is not more exposed the next day than the person who said nothing. That depends on recruitment practices that do not reward performance over honesty. It depends on legal and HR infrastructure that does not turn moments of disclosure into tools of management control. It depends on leadership that can stay in the room when something awkward is said, rather than narrowing eyes or changing the subject. Put together, this is a level of interlocking quality that most organisations do not have and cannot quickly build.
What they can quickly build is the yoga programme. So they build it, write it up in the annual report, and call it the work.
The effect of this is subtle but significant. The organisation now has an official position, which is that it takes wellbeing and psychological safety seriously, because it has a programme. The slot that might have been occupied by the actual work is now occupied by the proxy. People who notice the dynamics that remain are now in a more difficult position than before, because the organisation is on record as having dealt with them. Saying otherwise becomes an embarrassment rather than a contribution. This is a clear instance of proxy-capture: the measurable thing standing in for the underlying capacity and gradually replacing it in everyone’s map.
There is a second effect. Once the organisation has made public claims about the quality of its internal culture, it has to maintain the claim. The gap between what is claimed and what is experienced now has to be actively managed. People learn which things are safe to raise in the survey and which are not. Internal communication becomes thicker and more careful. Things that would once have been difficult to say become unspeakable. This is the territory David Graeber named Bullshit Jobs: the arrangements that exist because an organisation’s self-description has to be defended against the evidence of what is actually happening inside it.
None of this is an argument against yoga, volunteering or programmes of personal development. Those things have their own merits. They are not the work being described here. They are low-risk tasters, and sometimes they point in the direction of something more useful. Confusing the taster for the meal is what creates the damage.
The honest alternative is less glamorous. It involves accepting that addressing hidden dynamics in an organisation is a slow and interlocking piece of work, not a quarter’s initiative. It involves naming what is being done and what is not. We are doing this piece reasonably well; we are not doing this piece at all; this piece over here, we have started on but we have a long way to go. A sentence like that is hard to put in an annual report and easier to say to a team in a room, and organisations that can say it to a team tend to be the ones that eventually get somewhere. This is part of what what-this-is-not is pointing at: the difference between a programme that looks like the work and conditions under which the work could happen.
Mostly, what is required is the recognition that an organisation’s capacity to face its own dynamics is not something that can be added on through a calendar invite. It is a property of how the whole thing is set up: how people are hired, how conflict is handled, how leadership responds when an uncomfortable observation is made out loud, what happens to the person who made it a week later. You cannot fix this with a wellness budget, and you cannot hide it with one. The yoga class and its administration are sometimes better than nothing, but they are not better than acknowledging what has not yet been built.
Further reading:
↳ Why organisations cannot do what they say they want to do
Garden notes
- Proxy capture — the structural mechanism behind the yoga-class-as-substitute pattern: the measurable stands in for the thing and gradually replaces it.
- What this is not — distinguishes diagnostic work from wellness programmes, coaching and culture initiatives that can look similar from outside.
- Why organisations cannot do what they say they want to do — the structural reason organisations reach for the performative version when what is needed is substantive.
- Separated knowledge — why the people most likely to notice that the wellness programme is a proxy are usually not the people designing or reporting on it.