On cultural stagnation
This normalization of deviance means that people within an organization stop seeing problems as problems, making it impossible to learn from them. Stagnation kills resilience. A change-resistant culture, however, risks burning out those new people, as they find that they are unable to make any meaningful changes. Knowing what decisions were made and why can help prevent “we’ve always done it this way” as a fall-back reason for doing something. If you understand the constraints and trade-offs around why a past decision was made, you’ll be better equipped to understand if they are still relevant in your current context. push authority for decision-making down closest to where the work gets done If different members of an interview panel have very different views of how the organization works, that can be a sign of deeper issues. This often indicates implicit power structures or lack of clarity around process that can be frustrating to deal with and difficult to change.