You can’t mandate a system into changing. You can only change how it behaves one decision, one team, one conversation at a time and hope the pattern holds long enough to become the new normal.
That’s the tension sitting underneath two recent pieces on organizational change, and it’s worth naming directly, because most change efforts get stuck exactly here. Leadership wants holistic transformation. The org can only actually move locally. The question is whether those two things are in conflict, or whether local is just what holistic looks like up close.
The spreadsheet problem
Start with decision rights. Harvard Business Review’s Lindy Greer, Jennifer Jordan, and Maxim Sytch spent time inside more than 100 companies studying why tools like RACI, the framework meant to clarify who’s Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed on a given decision so often fail in practice (HBR). Their diagnosis isn’t that RACI is treated as a static artifact: a senior leader fills out a spreadsheet, hands it down, and expects compliance.
It doesn’t work that way. People don’t play assigned roles just because a document says so. Buy-in has to be built, and it has to be built at the level where the actual decision lives, not declared from three layers up.
Their fix is granular almost to a fault. Clarify the specific goal before assigning roles. Co-create the RACI with the people who’ll live with it. Write out what “accountable” and “responsible” actually mean in behavioral terms, because half the time people in the same room are using the words differently. Revisit the assignment as the decision evolves. None of this is a company-wide initiative. It’s a discipline applied one decision at a time, over and over, until it becomes how the place runs.
The pilot problem
Now put that next to a different piece of research: a qualitative study out of Comenius University Bratislava on “systemic project management”: a framework that folds soft factors like communication, trust, and team dynamics into project management, instead of treating time, cost, and scope as the whole story (Schneider & Papula). The researchers ran focus groups with experienced project managers at a global automotive supplier, and the findings on adoption are the interesting part.
Systemic project management is, by design, a holistic idea. It wants the whole organization thinking in terms of feedback loops and interdependence, not siloed metrics. But the experts in the study were unanimous on how you actually get there: you don’t roll it out. You pilot it in one small team, generate a real result, and use that as evidence to expand, “gradual integration along the entire value chain,” in the paper’s words, because systemic changes touch every project phase and no one adopts a complex theoretical framework on faith.
The paper leans on Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory to make the deeper point: acceptance isn’t a decision anyone makes once. It happens when a new way of thinking gets “anchored in organizational communication and continuously reproduced in everyday work.” Not approved. Reproduced. Repeatedly, locally, until it’s just how people talk to each other.
Same mechanism, two domains
Neither of these findings is really about RACI or about automotive project management. They’re about the same underlying mechanism showing up in a governance tool and in a cultural framework: systems don’t change because someone at the top declares a new state. Change happens because a local pattern gets repeated with enough fidelity, in enough places, that it becomes the system’s new default behavior.
This is not a new idea in systems thinking: it’s basically how self-organization works in any complex adaptive system. Global order is an emergent property of local rules, not something imposed from outside the system. What’s useful about lining up an HBR governance article with a systemic-PM academic paper is that you get the same mechanism validated in two completely different registers: hard-nosed management consulting on one side, systems-theory academic research on the other. When practitioners and theorists converge on the same answer from different directions, that’s usually a sign the answer is actually right, not just fashionable.
Where this breaks organizations
Most change efforts fail by picking one end of this and ignoring the other.
Some organizations over-index on the local and never generalize. They run the pilot, get the result, write the case study and then nothing spreads, because no one built the muscle for reproducing the pattern elsewhere. The HBR authors flag this exact failure: teams look at a beautifully co-created RACI once and never touch it again, so it calcifies into exactly the static artifact it was supposed to replace.
Others over-index on the holistic and skip the local entirely. Leadership announces a transformation with new values, new operating model, new framework without ever building the specific, repeatable local behaviors that would actually produce it. The systemic PM paper’s experts are blunt about this: you cannot convince an organization of a holistic idea with a slide deck. You need “measurable variables such as cost and time savings” from a real pilot before anyone with budget authority will move.
The failure mode is almost never “we tried to change locally and it didn’t add up to anything.” It’s usually one of the two half-measures above: local without a growth path, or holistic without a starting point small enough to actually work.
The actual takeaway
If you’re trying to shift how a team, a program, or how an organization operates, the sequencing that both pieces converge on looks something like this:
Pick a real, bounded decision or workflow, not an abstract goal. Build the new behavior with the people who’ll actually use it, not around them. Get it right in that one place before you generalize it. Then treat the generalization itself as an ongoing communicative act, not a one-time rollout because the moment people stop actively reproducing the new pattern in conversation and practice, it reverts to whatever the org defaulted to before.
Holistic change was never the alternative to local iteration. It’s what local iteration looks like once you’re standing far enough back to see the whole system doing it consistently. I learned a lot from these two articles. Give them a read.
Nicole
Sources:
Greer, L., Jordan, J., & Sytch, M. (2026). What Companies Get Wrong About Decision Rights. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2026/07/what-companies-get-wrong-about-decision-rights
Schneider, A., & Papula, J. (2026). Systemic Project Management and the Impact on Soft Factors in the Organisation. Systemic Practice and Action Research, 39:3. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11213-025-09755-w
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