---
author: "[[Bob Marshall]]"
tags:
  - blogpost
sources:
  - https://flowchainsensei.wordpress.com/2026/07/14/are-your-assumptions-destroying-your-employer-and-your-job/
publish: 2026-07-14
---
## Are Your Assumptions Destroying Your Employer – and Your Job?

Your organisation runs on a set of collective assumptions and beliefs. I call them memes – the interlocking, mostly implicit convictions everyone holds in common about how work should work. Together they form a memeplex: the collective mindset that, more than any process, tool or methodology, determines how effective your organisation can ever be.

Here’s the uncomfortable part. Nobody chose these memes. You inherited them – absorbed from a century of Taylorist management dogma, from business schools, from ‘that’s how every company does it’. And the lineage runs far darker and deeper than Taylor. Centuries before ‘scientific management’ got its name, the overseers and attorneys of Jamaican sugar plantations were pioneering its essentials: rigid hierarchy, minute division of labour, meticulous ledgers tracking human ‘productivity’ – with the workforce enslaved (Rosenthal, 2018). Command-and-control wasn’t born in the factory; it was refined in the cane fields. That’s the pedigree of the ‘common sense’ your organisation runs on. It feels like common sense precisely because nobody ever examines it. And as I argue in _Memeology_ (Marshall, 2021a), organisations that pay scant attention to their collective assumptions and beliefs are the ones whose change efforts are doomed from the outset – taking careers, including yours, down with them.

So let’s do what your organisation almost certainly never does: surface a few of these memes, hold them up to the light, and ask whether they’re serving your employer or quietly killing it.

### The Default Memeplex: Assumptions Doing the Damage

How many of the following does your organisation hold as unexamined _gospel_? Each is a meme I examine in _Memeology_ and _Quintessence_(Marshall, 2021b). Each has a corrosive shadow. And I’d wager your organisation subscribes to most of them.

**‘Hierarchy is necessary.’** Really? Says who? Hierarchy dissuades innovation, rewards compliance over contribution, gives dullards somewhere to hide, saps morale and drives your best people out the door. The quintessential alternative sits at the flat end of the spectrum: self-organisation and self-management, with decisions made by the people actually doing the work. Radical? Only if you’ve never questioned the alternative.

**‘Managers must manage.’** The belief that without managers directing, monitoring and controlling, nothing would get done. (A meme that applies, of course, only where there still _are_ managers – see the alternative: #NoManagers.) This is Theory X in action – people are lazy, need supervision, and must be bribed or coerced into effort (McGregor, 1960). Sixty-five years after McGregor demolished this posture, most organisations still run on it. Quintessential organisations hold Theory Y beliefs: people are intelligent, naturally self-motivated, take pride in good work and find genuine joy in attending to each other’s needs. Where those beliefs prevail, ‘managing’ people eventually becomes a nonsense – and so do managers.

And what of leadership? Rear Admiral Grace Hopper skewered the conceit in six words: ‘You manage things, you lead people’ (Schieber, 1987). But before anyone reaches for the heroic-leader trope – leading people doesn’t mean issuing orders either. David Marquet took command of the USS Santa Fe, the worst-performing submarine in the US fleet, and refused to give orders. He rejected the leader-follower model in favour of leader-leader: push authority to where the information lives, and have people declare ‘I intend to…’ rather than wait to be told (Marquet, 2012). The Santa Fe went from worst to first. On a nuclear submarine. If intent-based leadership works there, what’s your organisation’s excuse? The civilian cousin is the Advice Process: anyone can make any decision, having first sought advice from those affected and those with relevant expertise – no permission-seeking required. (I’ve written about [its promise, and its pitfalls in practice](https://flowchainsensei.wordpress.com/2017/04/27/the-advice-process-flaws-and-fixes/), elsewhere on this blog.)

**‘Busyness equals productivity.’** The most seductive meme of all, and utter tosh. Organisations chase high utilisation, treating slack as waste and idle hands as theft. Queueing theory says otherwise: as utilisation climbs, delays grow exponentially. An organisation where everyone is one hundred per cent busy is an organisation where nothing flows. And slack isn’t merely the absence of harm – it’s where all the good stuff happens. Slack is the organisation’s capacity to think, to learn, to improve, to respond when the market lurches sideways. As DeMarco (2001) puts it, slack is the lubricant of change; run every resource flat out and you’ve built an organisation that is, by design, incapable of changing. Utilisation has exactly one legitimate home – the constraint, the bottleneck. Everywhere else, quintessential organisations deliberately maintain slack, coach people to work fewer hours, and judge contribution by needs met, not hours filled. How busy is everyone where you work? And what has that busyness cost you in responsiveness, innovation and joy?

**‘Efficiency is the goal.’** Wrong target. Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things. Following Ackoff and Drucker, I regard the fixation on efficiency as a pernicious distraction – better to do the right thing wrong than the wrong thing right. The greatest risk in knowledge work isn’t doing things slowly. It’s doing the wrong things altogether – briskly, and on budget.

**‘Talent is our greatest asset.’** Flattering, and wrong twice over. Per Deming (1986), some 90–95 per cent of performance is down to the system – the way the work works – not individual ability. And it’s not people but the _relationships between_ people that constitute the organisation’s greatest asset. Yet the ‘war for talent’ rumbles on, with organisations bidding fortunes for star hires while ignoring the system and the relationships. Polishing brass on a sinking ship.

**‘The single gifted individual is paramount.’** The talent meme’s uglier sibling: the cult of the lone genius. The 10x developer. The rockstar, the ninja, the hero who swoops in and saves the release. It’s a seductive story – and pure poison for teaming. Elevate the gifted individual and watch what follows: knowledge hoarded as personal capital, colleagues recast as competitors, stack-ranked appraisals pitting teammates against each other, and a single point of failure with a big ego and a flight risk. Worse, it teaches everyone else to defer – why contribute when the hero has it covered? Collaboration withers; the team becomes an audience. Quintessential organisations know that people collaborating together outperform even the most gifted individual working alone – that’s why they embrace ensemble working and mob programming, and why team success hinges on placing team goals above personal self-interest. Fellowship beats genius. Every time. Who are the designated heroes where you work – and what is their heroism costing everyone else?

**‘Someone must be accountable.’** Ah, the single wringable neck. Sounds rigorous. Breeds blame, fear and defensive behaviour – the precise conditions under which candour dies. The quintessential alternative is group accountability rooted in voluntary commitment: people take on what needs doing because they care about attending to folks’ needs, not because a neck has been designated for wringing.

**‘Organise by function; run the work as projects.’** Silos and projects are so normal we barely see them as choices. But value flows _horizontally_ – silos guarantee handoffs, queues and bottlenecks. And endlessly forming and disbanding project teams shreds the fellowship that makes teams effective in the first place. Quintessential organisations prefer long-running value streams and standing teams, bringing work to people rather than people to work. #NoProjects, anyone?

**‘Some things are best left unsaid.’** Every organisation has its undiscussables. And the topics too dangerous to raise are, invariably, the ones most worth raising. Undiscussability is how all the other destructive memes survive: they persist because questioning them is career-limiting. Quintessential organisations maintain zero tolerance for undiscussability. What can’t be said out loud where you work?

### Why This Destroys Employers

These memes interlock, and that’s the trap. Hierarchy demands managers; managers justify themselves through utilisation and individual accountability; accountability breeds fear; fear feeds undiscussability; and undiscussability ensures none of it ever gets questioned. A self-sealing system. That’s what makes a memeplex so stable – and so lethal. Culture, as I often note, is a read-only manifestation of the underlying assumptions and beliefs. Trying to ‘change culture’ without shifting the assumptions beneath it? Rearranging symptoms.

And the cost is anything but abstract. My Rightshifting work suggests quintessential organisations are some five times more effective than the norm. Flip that around: the median organisation, running on the default memeplex, is leaving maybe eighty per cent of its potential on the table. In competitive markets, that gap kills. Your employer won’t be destroyed by a competitor’s brilliance. It’ll be destroyed by its own unexamined beliefs, one deferred conversation at a time.

### Why This Destroys Jobs

And you? If your employer’s collective mindset is throttling its effectiveness, your job security is hostage to those assumptions whether you personally hold them or not. But let’s be honest – most of us don’t merely suffer the memeplex. We feed it. We keep visibly busy because busyness gets read as value. We kick decisions upstairs because hierarchy expects it. We oppose teaming because we believe individuality offers more – more recognition, more reward, more control. We bite our tongues on the undiscussables because speaking out feels risky. Every one of those daily acts props up the very assumptions eroding the organisation that pays us.

There’s a second, more personal layer: the memes shape what you believe about your own work. Swallowed ‘talent matters most’? You’ll neglect the system and the relationships that actually determine your effectiveness. Swallowed ‘the way the work works is management’s business’? You’ll never exercise the ownership that makes work meaningful – and makes you valuable.

### The Way Out: Surface and Reflect

The remedy I propose in _Memeology_ is deceptively simple and genuinely hard: make the time and space to collectively surface your organisation’s assumptions and beliefs, and reflect on them together. Not an away-day. Not a values poster. An ongoing practice of asking, meme by meme: what do we actually believe here? Is that belief serving the needs of the Folks That Matter? What might we choose to believe instead?

_Quintessence_ then serves as the aide-memoire for the destination: a portrait, meme by meme, of what a highly effective organisation believes – an idealised design in Ackoff’s sense (Ackoff, Magidson and Addison, 2006). And no, you can’t cherry-pick a few new beliefs and bolt them on. Memes interlock, so lasting change means the rolling, wholesale replacement of one memeplex with another. But the journey starts wherever a group of people is willing to make one assumption discussable.

So here’s my invitation for this week. Grab a colleague or three. Pick one meme – hierarchy, busyness, accountability, take your choice – and ask out loud: ‘What do we actually believe about this here, and is that belief helping us?’

If merely asking that question feels dangerous in your organisation – congratulations. You’ve just surfaced the most important meme of all.

### Further Reading

Ackoff, R. L., Magidson, J., & Addison, H. J. (2006). _Idealized design: Creating an organization’s future_. Wharton School Publishing.

Deming, W. E. (1986). _Out of the crisis_. MIT Center for Advanced Engineering Study.

DeMarco, T. (2001). _Slack: Getting past burnout, busywork, and the myth of total efficiency_. Broadway Books.

Marquet, L. D. (2012). _Turn the ship around!: A true story of turning followers into leaders_. Portfolio.

Marshall, R. W. (2017, April 27). The advice process – flaws and fixes. _Think Different_. [https://flowchainsensei.wordpress.com/2017/04/27/the-advice-process-flaws-and-fixes/](https://flowchainsensei.wordpress.com/2017/04/27/the-advice-process-flaws-and-fixes/)

Marshall, R. W. (2018). _Hearts over diamonds: Serving business and society through organisational psychotherapy_. Falling Blossoms. [https://leanpub.com/heartsoverdiamonds](https://leanpub.com/heartsoverdiamonds)

Marshall, R. W. (2021a). _Memeology: Surfacing and reflecting on the organisation’s collective assumptions and beliefs_. Falling Blossoms. [https://leanpub.com/memeology](https://leanpub.com/memeology)

Marshall, R. W. (2021b). _Quintessence: An acme for software development organisations_. Falling Blossoms. [https://leanpub.com/quintessence](https://leanpub.com/quintessence)

McGregor, D. (1960). _The human side of enterprise_. McGraw-Hill.

Rosenthal, C. (2018). _Accounting for slavery: Masters and management_. Harvard University Press.

Schieber, P. (1987, March/April). The wit and wisdom of Grace Hopper. _OCLC Newsletter_, 167.