The runway is perfect

You have a document somewhere in your company that describes how another company works.

Maybe it's a deck. Maybe a Miro board someone made after a conference talk, or a wiki page with boxes and arrows and a naming convention that isn't yours. Somebody senior saw the original and came back convinced. What arrived three months later was the shape of it — the ceremonies, the vocabulary, the org chart redrawn to match. Two years on, you still run the ceremonies. And if you asked anyone honestly whether it made you faster, you'd get the same long pause you'd get about a dead project nobody will kill.

I want to explain why that happens. And I want to do it without any of the usual contempt, because the contempt is the part that's wrong.

Every practice has a half you cannot photograph

In 1984 General Motors and Toyota opened a joint venture in Fremont, California, called NUMMI. GM went in partly to learn the Toyota Production System from the inside — the most generous access one carmaker has ever handed a rival. A GM vice-president is said to have briefed his people on the way in: go there with cameras, take a picture of every square inch, and whatever you photograph, I want it to look like that in our plant.

That sentence is the whole essay.

They did it. Kanban cards appeared in GM factories, andon cords were strung along the lines, and Van Nuys was converted without retraining everyone. It failed. The plants looked right and the numbers didn't move. The verdict on the whole approach was blunt: the Toyota system isn't something you can copy, and you can't even take a photograph of it.

Spear and Bowen published the autopsy in Harvard Business Review in 1999. The visible tools had never been the system. Toyota runs as a continuous series of controlled experiments — every specification is a hypothesis, and following the process is how it gets tested. The cards are what a hypothesis looks like on a Tuesday.

You can film a cord being pulled. You cannot film the reason it is safe to pull it.

Every practice worth copying has two halves. The visible half is artefacts, rituals, roles and words, and it travels beautifully — photograph it, put it on a slide, teach it in an afternoon. The causal half is trust, incentives, history, and what happens to the person who says the expensive thing out loud. The camera takes the first one perfectly. It has never once taken the second.

We are the species that trusts the camera

Before you conclude that your organisation is uniquely stupid, I want to tell you why this is the most human thing it could possibly be doing.

In 2005 the psychologists Victoria Horner and Andrew Whiten sat chimpanzees and young children in front of a puzzle box. They showed them how to open it, mixing the moves that mattered with one that plainly didn't: tapping the lid with a stick before working the latch. With an opaque box, both species copied everything, tap included. Then they ran it again with a transparent box, where you could see the stick touching nothing. The chimpanzees dropped the tap and went for the reward. The children kept tapping.

Researchers have chased that result around the world ever since, mostly expecting an artefact of Western schooling. It isn't one. Children in Kalahari Bushman communities do it exactly as children in Brisbane do — Nielsen and Tomaselli, Psychological Science, 2010. It survives being warned about, too. In a 2007 PNAS study, Lyons, Young and Keil found children performing the pointless steps even after being told to skip them. They had already encoded those steps as causal. You cannot reason your way out of something you are perceiving rather than deciding.

It also strengthens with age. We are the species that copies the parts that don't matter, and we get better at it as we get older.

That sounds like a defect until you see the bill for the alternative. Bitter manioc is a staple across the Amazon, and it is laced with cyanide. The Tukanoan preparation runs for days: scrape, grate, wash until fibre and starch and liquid come apart, then leave the solids standing two more days before baking. Several of those steps look like pure superstition. Skip them and dinner is fine — this year. The poisoning is chronic, surfacing years later as goitre and nerve damage, so nobody could have learned the connection in a single lifetime. Joseph Henrich's point is that faithful copying, by people who could not possibly explain it, is all that stands between a culture and a slow invisible poison. The clever ones who streamlined it were never punished quickly enough to learn.

Nothing inside the act of copying tells you which step is load-bearing. The stick-tap and the two-day rest look identical from the outside. Both are steps performed by a successful practitioner. The only way to tell them apart is to know why the step is there — and knowing why is precisely what copying lets you skip.

The caricature was always about us

There's an old name for this, and it needs handling honestly before I use it. It entered print in a colonial news magazine in 1945, in an article fretting about a post-war flare-up among New Guinea natives. In 1993 the anthropologist Lamont Lindstrom argued the framing was ethnocentric to its core: it cast Melanesian movements as pathological mimicry and denied the people in them any agency. Those movements were older than the war anyway — John Frum, on Tanna, dates from the late 1930s and was in part organised resistance to missionaries and colonial administrators. Anthropology has largely retired the term. It deserved retiring.

What survived is Feynman's use of it. In his 1974 commencement address at Caltech he described islanders who had watched cargo planes land during the war and afterwards cleared runways, lit fires along the sides, and raised a wooden hut for a man to sit in — two wooden pieces on his head like headphones, bamboo bars for antennas. “They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land.” His target was his own field: work carrying all the forms of science, missing the integrity he called leaning over backwards to prove yourself wrong.

They were photographing an airfield with their bodies. And they had an excuse we don't. From where they stood, the causal half — a war economy, a supply chain, a factory eight thousand kilometres away — was genuinely unobservable. The caricature survived because it describes us.

The photograph is the cheapest thing to ship

For fifteen years my job was to help teams think differently. Facilitate the workshop, run the sprint, get people to understand their users and choose what to build next. I was good at it. The room was energised, the ideas were often brilliant, and the wall at the end photographed beautifully. Then most of it died in a drawer. I had been delivering the visible half of a practice whose causal half is a roadmap somebody is allowed to change, and a person in the room who can cancel something. I kept carrying in the half that fits in a suitcase.

What makes this more than a private mistake is that organisations reward it. DiMaggio and Powell named the pattern in 1983: mimetic isomorphism. Under uncertainty, when goals are ambiguous and success is hard to measure, organisations model themselves on whoever looks successful and legitimate. The payoff is legitimacy, not performance. That explains what otherwise makes no sense — how a ritual survives five years of not working. It was never being paid for working.

Spotify is the case everyone reaches for, and it's worth being precise. In 2012 two agile coaches there, Kniberg and Ivarsson, published thirteen pages on how the company was organised at that moment — squads, tribes, chapters, guilds — and said in the paper that it was a snapshot of something already in motion. Their own coach Joakim Sundén put it plainly years later: part ambition, part approximation, and people struggled to copy something that didn't really exist. Jeremiah Lee, a product manager there from 2017, published the inside account in 2020: never fully implemented, and already being rebuilt while the world installed it. The diagram that travelled the world was a photograph of a photograph.

The sweep is easy once you can see it, and I'll start with my own trade. Design thinking travels as a workshop format and arrives without the roadmap authority that made the original workshop consequential. OKRs leave Google without the psychological safety that makes honest scoring survivable, so everyone quietly learns to set targets they know they'll hit. The Netflix culture deck goes up on the walls of companies that punish precisely the candour it describes. Same move every time. The visible half travels; the causal half stays home.

Before you install it

Chesterton's fence is the well-worn rule for reformers: don't tear down a fence until you know why it was put there. This is the same fence from the other side. Don't install one until you know why it stood. Both directions are the same blindness — treating the visible thing as the reason.

So before the next framework comes through your door, ask it the questions a photograph can't answer. What problem did the inventors have, and do you have it? If your releases need eleven approvals, the answer isn't squads. It's fewer approvals. What did it cost them — who gave up a veto, whose budget moved, what got stopped? A case study naming nobody who lost anything is marketing, not mechanism. And then the sharpest one: who, in the original, was allowed to say the expensive thing out loud, and what happened to them afterwards?

Then adopt it the way Toyota writes a specification: as a hypothesis, not an identity. Not “we are adopting squads” but “we believe cross-functional ownership will cut our handoff delay from eleven days to four by March, and if it doesn't, we stop.” Then walk your own rituals, one at a time, and ask what breaks if this goes. If the answer is a shrug, you own a stick-tap. If it's a real failure someone can describe in detail, you own a two-day rest — protect it fiercely. The person who can still name the failure may be the last one who can.

You will not stop copying, and you shouldn't want to. The instinct that has you reaching for someone else's operating model is the same one that lets a team inherit competence it never had to earn. It's the reason anybody in the Amazon survived dinner. What you can stop is shipping the photograph and calling it the building. The runway is always perfect. That was never the hard part.

If you want to see how your team actually behaves when a risky idea turns up — not what the process document says, but what happens — the Innovation Mirror takes about three minutes and hands you one thing to change before your next meeting. It's a diagnosis, not a diagram to copy.