We Actually Knew That
Prologue to the series "Resilient. Human. Future-Fit." Why good intentions aren't enough, and what 800 years of constitutional history can teach us about it.
It happens often. Very often. Once the operational hectic has settled, on the way back to your desk, after the meeting, once the decision has long been made and the project has long since failed: "We actually knew that."
The sentence is part reflex, part quiet realization. It describes a deep pattern. The knowledge was there. It's rarely used as fully as it could be. There were hints, gut feelings, people who saw what was developing. The knowledge just never reached the decision. It never found a way to become visible, audible, heard.
If you understand how management models, organizational structures and "the whole" connect, you know the cost of that. The reorganization that fizzled out in daily life. The mission statement, expensively developed, then stuck on the wall. The employee whose absence made clear she'd held all the threads, supposedly invisible. None of that is bad luck. Too often, it's a flaw in the system.
The assumption most organizations run on
Most organizations operate on a simple assumption: the right people in the right place will do the right thing. We call this trust, culture, attitude, values. As long as daily business runs well and pressure stays low, it works astonishingly well.
But where does pressure stay low for long these days? In growth phases, almost every company trades control for speed. In a crisis, dialogue and broader participation are the first things cut. When market, owners and competition push in the same direction, hard values turn into soft bargaining chips. That's when it becomes clear: an attitude anchored nowhere in the structure was never a value. It was a feeling.
I'm not raising a moralizing finger here, who would I be to do that. It's just a recurring insight of mine. An organization that only functions when everyone involved has integrity and pressure stays low has no load-bearing structure. It's living a wish. It wants to please.
What it's missing has a name, even if it sounds grand at first: a constitution. Not in the legal sense, but one for your organization. Where does that claim come from? From 800 years of experience with this exact question.
An 800-year-old answer
There is a place where this problem has been thought through longer and more seriously than in any management theory: constitutional law.
Constitutions emerge from the same experience. The Magna Carta of 1215 was a peace treaty against royal arbitrariness. The US Constitution of 1787 answered a simple fact: distant power doesn't limit itself. Germany's Basic Law of 1949 drew the harshest lesson of all, the one from a Weimar Republic whose conduct paved the way for a dictator and a world war. Power corrupts not just bad people, but structures. Whoever takes that seriously stops relying on the right individuals. They build structures that make the right thing more likely, no matter who's acting. The Swiss Federal Constitution takes this a step further: it makes participation and sustainability an explicit purpose of the commonwealth.
Good constitutions don't rely on the right people being in the right place. They build an architecture that makes that irrelevant.
Organizations seeking long-term stability, wanting independence from moods, trends and individual leaders, need a constitution, not another mission statement. Not a constitution in the legal sense, but a load-bearing architecture: the assumptions, principles and structures that hold when goodwill wavers.
But the fashionable answer falls short
You might be thinking: purpose, we've done that already, and this is at best the next fad chasing through the village. Old wine in even older skins, "matured" all the way to vinegar. Whole movements work to distribute power and trust people, from New Work to self-organization to "Humanocracy." These movements are half right and half a problem. Right, because rigid hierarchies keep people small. A problem, because tearing down structures doesn't abolish power. It just makes it invisible. Where there are no more rules, informal hierarchy rules, at best based on competence, at worst on pure power posturing. Neither knows a procedure, an objection, or protection.
Here's the difference. Bureaucracy is control without protection. A constitution is protection through structure.
The series starting with this piece isn't about whether you dismantle hierarchy. It's about what you put in its place.
Over the following six essays, I describe three benchmarks against which a pressure-resistant organization must be measured. Resilience, because orientation comes from structure, not from appeals. Humanity, because the individual must be protected and the many must be involved. Future-fitness, because purpose must reach beyond the present. In short: how do you build organizations that are resilient, human, and future-fit at once?
I follow my own credo: first clarity of sight, seeing what's really holding things back. Then clarity of principle, naming what carries. Then impact, casting it into structure that holds.
To keep this from staying abstract, I read four constitutional traditions, the Magna Carta, the US Constitution, the Basic Law, and the Swiss Federal Constitution, against the reality of organizations. Against companies that gave themselves a constitution, from Patagonia to the Carl Zeiss Foundation to Sparkasse Bremen. Against models of self-organization like Buurtzorg, W. L. Gore, Haier, and cooperatives. And against the cases where exactly that was missing, where power ended up ruling in the shadows. This isn't state theory. It's what 800 years of experience with power mean for your management model.
One thing up front, no need to worry: you already have this. I mean an organizational constitution. Every organization has one. It's just usually unwritten, grown organically, built on hope, which is why you usually can't see it or read it. My goal is to make it visible. You can't rebuild a structure you can't see.
This series is also a mirror
There's a second reason I'm writing this. Anyone responsible for an organization carries a conflict, sometimes quiet, sometimes loud, that people rarely talk about: you want the structure to hold, to take the load off, to make things run, so your head and hands are free for what matters. You know you should share power, and part of you would rather keep close what only depends on you. You call values important and have already quietly suspended them yourself when it got expensive.
That's not weakness. It's an honest description of responsibility. So these essays aren't only about organizations. They also aim at the moment you recognize yourself in one of the stories. That recognition is uncomfortable, sometimes painful, but useful, because it's the start of clarity. Clarity that isn't meant to overwhelm you yet. It's enough to notice it and be able to name it.
That's why every essay ends with two questions: one for your organization, one for you.
I can't promise you a recipe against chaos and overload, nothing that does this work for you without you. What I can give you is a double perspective, on your organization and on your own part in it, before the next time you're standing in the hallway saying, "We actually knew that." If a quiet discomfort brushes past you somewhere while reading, pause there. That's the point.
Resilient. Human. Future-Fit.
A series of seven essays on what organisations can learn from 800 years of constitutional history. All English essays.