Reported Complete. Not Correct. Why Organisations Drift
If it’s reported done, it’s done.
Every milestone was met. The integration was on schedule. And yet the company was shipping the wrong products to its customers. The reports weren't wrong. The milestones had genuinely been completed. The problem was that nobody was measuring the thing that mattered.
This is organisational drift: the growing gap between what leaders believe is happening, what people actually do to get the work done, and what the evidence would show if anyone checked.
What happened
A manufacturer acquired a smaller competitor. A programme management office (PMO) was established to oversee the integration, and each function planned its activities carefully. One task among many was to migrate the acquired company's product catalogue into the acquirer's systems. The product codes were copied across as they were and loaded into the acquiring company’s system. The PMO reported the activity as complete. By every measure being tracked, the integration remained on schedule.
The first indication of a problem came not from the PMO, Distribution or Manufacturing. It came from customers. Retailers began contacting Customer Services to report that the wrong products had been delivered. Distribution was initially confused because the orders had been fulfilled exactly as the system instructed. After some rapid scrambling, the cause was identified. The acquired company’s product codes did not match the physical products they represented.
The acquired company's customer service team had known about this for years. Despite codes being incorrectly assigned to their products, they had developed workarounds to ensure customers received the correct products. And although the workarounds worked, they were never documented, never escalated and weren’t visible to anyone outside the customer services team. When the data moved into a new system, the workarounds disappeared. The underlying issues remained and quickly surfaced as a significant problem for customers and the acquiring company alike.
What drift is
This is what we mean by organisational drift. It is the growing gap between:
· What leaders believe is happening
· What people actually do to get the work done
· What the evidence would show, if anyone checked.
Drift rarely begins with a major mistake. It accumulates through dozens of small adjustments that all seem reasonable at the time: a check that is assumed rather than completed; shortcut introduced under pressure, workaround that becomes "the way we do things here".
In the story above, nobody lacked capability, nobody acted carelessly, nobody intended to create a problem. Leaders believed the data had been checked and was true. The evidence would have shown that it hadn't. Nobody asked the evidence.
Why the systems built to catch it often miss it
The PMO existed to prevent exactly this kind of failure. It still missed it. The reason matters for every board and leadership team. Most governance systems are designed to report completion, not correctness. Boards are usually assured about progress. They are less often assured about accuracy. The question should not simply be: "Was the work completed?" The more important question is: "Did the work achieve what we believe it achieved?" Those are not always the same thing.
Every report in this case was accurate. Every milestone had been completed. The conclusion that everything was fine was wrong. That is why the belief, “We'd know if something was wrong" can be so dangerous. Very often the organisation is structured to know whether work has been done, not whether the result is correct.
The uncomfortable part: good people hide problems
There is a second lesson here and it is harder to accept. The acquired company's team did nothing wrong. They adapted skilfully around a fault and protected customers from its consequences. But their effectiveness also kept the problem hidden. The organisation appeared healthy because capable people were quietly compensating for a weakness within it.
In many organisations, adaptability first appears as a strength. Only later does it become clear that it was masking a deeper problem. Local workarounds are not necessarily signs of resilience. They may be, and they may also be indicators of systemic weaknesses that nobody has addressed.
When you discover a workaround, a useful question is not simply, "How did they solve this?" It’s: "What is this compensating for?"
What happened next
The story does not end with the failure. The company acknowledged the problem quickly and openly. It informed affected customers. It reviewed every order. Replacement products were provided where necessary. Sales and Customer Services remained engaged until every issue had been resolved. Some customers were understandably frustrated. Most, over time, ultimately respected the company's willingness to recognise the mistake and put it right. Its reputation emerged stronger than many expected.
The same failure handled defensively, slowly or inconsistently could have produced a very different result. Which highlights an important point: a mistake is rarely what determines the outcome. The outcome is often determined by how effectively the organisation recognises, responds to and learns from the mistake.
Questions for Boards and Leadership teams
Drift is normal, not exceptional. Every organisation has some. The question is whether you find it before it finds you. Five questions can help:
Which of the things we report as complete have been checked against what is actually happening?
Where are people working around problems, and what are those workarounds compensating for?
Who would notice this type of issue first, and do they have the authority to raise it?
When something goes wrong, do we hear about it first from our own systems or from customers?
What assumptions about the organisation have we not tested recently?
None of these questions requires a new programme. They require curiosity and a willingness to hear answers that may be uncomfortable.
What comes next
Finding a problem is one thing. Correcting it is another. Correcting it so that it stays corrected is something else entirely. Some organisations seem able to do this repeatedly, others find themselves revisiting the same issues again and again. The difference may not be intelligence, effort or leadership capability. It may be Adaptive Capacity.
