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My guess, is that the people who could break protocol are too busy to deal with a request to break protocol. Too busy to give it a thought.

And anyone who is sympathetic to the request, knows that campaigning for the protocol break would require disrupting two or three levels of management above them, forcing powerful people to deal with something they don't care about. And that would be interpreted as wasting important people's time.

So the organization, as a decision making entity, is incapable of recognizing, much less considering, requests for an exception to default behavior.

I worked with a business that operated this way for many years. Even when there were overwhelming reasons to break process, the spark and tinder never got anywhere near each other.

Everyone between the spark and tinder empathized, talked to "somebody" to demonstrate they "tried", and to create an alibi for the inevitable "no" response that came next, while quietly doing everything they could to smother that spark, before it burned them.






Thank for describing so eloquently this phenomenon, which IMHO is the root cause of the dysfunction endemic to big companies.



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