Practice drift
Our collaboration agreed on a radical new way of working, but in the heat of delivery, we find ourselves slipping back into old, familiar habits.
We started with such clear intentions. We co-created a set of powerful principles for how we wanted to work together—valuing every voice, embracing uncertainty, and sharing power. But as deadlines loom and the pressure mounts, those intentions are starting to feel like a distant memory. Decisions are being made by a small, central group again “for the sake of speed,” and the focus has narrowed back to traditional metrics, overlooking the richer, multi-capital contributions we agreed to value. There’s a growing gap between the collaborative, equitable culture we aspire to and the more conventional, hierarchical way we're actually operating day-to-day. How do we close this gap and ensure our lived practices stay true to our stated values, especially when things get tough?
Connecting Learnings to this Challenge
This drift between stated values and actual practice is one of the most common challenges in complex collaborations. It highlights the difficulty of embodying new ways of working under pressure.
Areas of the Many-to-Many System that aim to address this challenge
“Practice Drift” is a sign that a collaboration's core principles are not yet fully embedded in its operational DNA. The following areas are designed to help diagnose and address this gap:
- Organising System: This is the primary area for addressing practice drift, as it focuses directly on how ‘deep codes’ are translated into the day-to-day work of planning, role distribution, and decision-making.
- Governance System: If the formal governance doesn't create clear accountability to the new ways of working, old habits will naturally resurface. This area helps build in the necessary reinforcement.
- Learning System: A robust learning system is crucial for noticing when practice drift is happening and creating the feedback loops needed to consciously course-correct.
- Deep Code Shifts: This drift is fundamentally a failure to live into the desired deep code shifts. Revisiting these provides a clear diagnostic for where the drift is occurring (e.g., are we drifting back to financial-only risk?)
We note that the Many-to-Many System focusses on, and therefore shares, infrastructural and process aids for these challenges. We recognise other critical facets including but not limited to relational holding, tending to power, team-building, facilitation and practice development could and should play a role in solving the challenges.
Tools and Examples linked to this Challenge
Closing the gap between values and action requires practical tools that make the desired practices visible and intentional. The tools and examples below offer ways to embed your principles into daily routines, meeting structures, and decision-making processes, making it easier to “walk the talk.”
No related tools found.
Alerts
Alerts are the critical 'watch-outs'—the common challenges, tensions, complexities, and areas where we learned special attention is required.
Forgetting that practice trumps design
While a governance approach can design a great container for the work, it is the practice of showing up together that most shapes the collaboration. Insufficient focus on practicing the behaviours, processes, capacities and methods to be in governance together can lead to poor governance cultures, whatever the beauty of the design.
Insufficient capacity, time and resource given to collaborating
It is often significantly underestimated how much time and attention is needed for the organising, governing, learning, operating, practising, embodying and other systems needed in order to do good work collaboratively. When this is not given enough attention the conditions erode over time.
Too much emphasis on one area out of balance with the others
When stewarding governance, part of the skill is balancing focus on the mission and planned work (the why and what) with attention to governance, learning, and organising (the how). Too much emphasis on one side can disrupt group dynamics.
The mission and work provide momentum and direction, while governance, learning, and organising help manage differences, risks, tensions, disagreements, and learning. Each depends on the other, and if the balance is off, the collaboration can start to dysfunction.
Learning deprioritisation
Once a collaboration moves into its operational phase, the learning infrastructure is often the first to be deprioritised when time and capacity are limited. Be cautious — neglecting it can lead to fragmentation over time.
Insights
Insights are the key discoveries that emerged from our work and point to promising pathways and core principles.
Stewardship needs some systemic design
Good intentions alone are normally insufficient for good collaboration. We need to nurture a system that notices perverse incentives and externalities and accounts for them.
This is rarely something that can be done long-term by relational tending alone - some form of active systemic design is likely to be needed. This design can aim to create progressively better incentives and more capable deterrents for the behaviours, cultures and norms that the work needs.
Organising system
The Organising System focuses on how deep codes cascade into the day-to-day operations and coordination of work. It addresses how the collaboration plans, distributes roles, forecasts and manages value, holds spaces, makes operational decisions, shares information, and communicates in ways that reinforce the desired deep codes.
Without some attention, traditional approaches can default us back to patterns of relating that we are seeking to disrupt.
Exploring and embedding deep code shifts
Societal transformation involves rethinking how we see the world and our place in it. How will these underlying ideas shape how you work together? What approaches to power, value, ownership, accountability and risk do you want to hold? Writing these down can help keep them present and guide you through change.
Deeply embedding the mission(s)
In complex collaborations, it’s common for people to hold different assumptions about what the work is accountable to, especially when needs and priorities vary. Are decisions accountable to the people involved? To participating organisations? To group dynamics? To the mission? If the answer is a mix, what is the order of priority?
If this is not made explicit, accountability can become unclear and misaligned. Building clarity about accountability — and making sure the mission is part of that — into the collaboration’s structures and everyday practices can help create coherence.
Sensing What to Do Next
A key challenge for early stewards is developing appropriate ways to understand the live dynamics of the complex system in order to determine what to do next. The Field Guide offers some methods for mapping patterns that can support this sensing.
Learning system
A learning system helps us to interpret progress, adapting strategies, and enabling the ongoing evolution of all other governance elements, ensuring the collaboration can dynamically live into its mission over time.