Humans like to compartmentalise things.
The concrete, tangible stuff goes in one box: process, data, technology, strategy, roadmaps. That feels like a system that is designable, manageable, sometimes linear, and somewhat controllable. They allow people to focus on their own box but risk tunnel vision.
The fuzzy stuff goes in another box: culture and incentives, morale, and perception. These are the colouring between the lines, the intangibles that are arguably more important than the concrete. But they're harder to hold as a concept, so we put them aside and we deprioritise.
But the fuzzy stuff doesn't go away just because you've deprioritised it. It shows up anyway: just not where you expect.
Transformation projects fail not because the solution is bad, but because people don't want it. You can build it but you can't force people to use it. When incentives look aligned on paper but culturally pull in opposite directions, you don't get pushback; you get workarounds, bad behaviours and dodgy shortcuts, all hidden rather than visible. That's worse, because by the time you see it, it's already cascading.
The only reliable counter is involvement, bringing people on the journey. Have them take ownership because invested people don't sabotage systems they helped build.
When you are constantly working towards moving goalposts, where survival is dependent on rapid evolution or correction, you don't have the luxury of being able to hold these concepts apart.
The tension between autonomy and alignment is ever-present. The balance is: connected enough to see the whole, separated enough for people to own their bit and get on with it.
When things are too distinct, teams work towards their own interpretation of some shared goal - if you're lucky enough for them to be aligned. Sometimes they're duplicating effort, or they're doing the same thing in completely different ways, or sometimes they're going the complete opposite way. This is how mixed messages go out to the market, leaving your clients confused. It starts to look like nobody's running the show.
Then someone says "we need to remove the silos", and the pendulum swings the other way. Suddenly, teams feel like they've lost autonomy, everyone has compromised (poorly) and no one is happy. The north star and strategy might be clear, but if your day-to-day says something completely different, no one thinks about the bigger picture.
That's the thing about systems thinking - it sounds like engineering, but so much of it is the focus on connective tissue: those threads you can't see. It's the interactions between what people do and how they feel about doing it. You can't design the hard stuff and ignore the soft stuff.
A good system is governed to enable your aspirations. It sees the whole but works at the level of the individual part; it opens up the world of possibilities rather than shutting them down.
That's not what most people mean when they say governance. Governance sounds like bureaucracy - policies, sign-off chains, tick-box exercises. These are easier to create and prove. But you can have the certification and still have a mess underneath. These bolt-ons just cause inhibitive friction and, ultimately, frustration.
When governed well, systems are designed to make the compliant path the easy path - nobody has to think about it or care. The guardrails are invisible, and just work. People are freed from administrative burden, allowing them to just get on with things. If the design is right, you can have both protection and usability. They're only opposites when the design is bad.
Once you've got foundations that hold and a system that protects the people in it, you can put real weight on top. New capabilities, new tools. Which is what every organisation is being asked about right now.