The reliability that inert routines buy eventually kills organizations

Evidence

Routinizing and institutionalizing organizational activities are seen as imperative in order to guarantee stakeholders reliability, accountability, and, finally, survival in competitive environments. Inertia is considered a precondition for effective organizational acting but, paradoxically enough, eventually threatens the organization’s survival, because it is likely to bring about a mismatch with changing environmental conditions. — Jörg Sydow, Georg Schreyögg, and Jochen Koch, Organizational Path Dependence, 65

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A genuine paradox at the heart of organizational theory: the same property that secures survival in stable conditions guarantees failure in changing ones.
• XREF: Resonates with the innovator’s dilemma and with biological Escalator-to-extinction arguments about over-specialization.
• SEED: Essay angle: ‘The Competence Trap’—how institutions that achieve reliability at scale buy certainty at the price of adaptability.