Until you succeed, you are like a curious child trying different ways. If this does not work, what else? What else? The exploration continues until something works. And then a strange thing happens.
Success creates a formula. The formula gets repeated. The repetition gets reinforced. And slowly, invisibly, what worked becomes what must be done. The exploration stops. The formula ossifies.
But something else happens too, something less obvious. With each success, the organisation is building a world.
Not a world in the physical sense. A world in the way fiction writers use the term: a coherent architecture of assumptions, boundaries, unwritten rules, and shared meanings that determine what is possible and what is unthinkable. Tolkien did not just write a story; he built Middle-earth, complete with histories, languages, and logics that made certain conflicts inevitable alliances impossible. The world came first. The story followed from its architecture.
Organisations do the same, though rarely with intention. Every early decision, every near-miss, every pattern that got reinforced creates architecture. Over time, this architecture becomes what might be called a meaningplex: a complex yet coherent matrix of meanings, values, norms, and ways of making sense. This meaningplex is the organisation's world. Invisible, coherent, governing.
This is the paradox at the heart of organisational life. Success builds worlds. But success also makes those worlds invisible. The practices that created the organisation become so familiar that they disappear from view. They feel like reality rather than choices. Leaders do not think about them. They think within themselves.
And what you cannot see, you cannot change.
How Worlds Form
Developmental science offers a useful lens. In a child's formative years, foundational instincts develop rapidly. Some are inborn. Some are imbued from family and culture. Some are induced through deliberate care. With appropriate support, the child enters an agency-building upward spiral where capabilities compound.
Compromised support triggers the opposite: an agency-robbing downward spiral where early gaps widen over time.
Consider a child who is praised early for being "the smart one." This child builds a world where intelligence means having answers, where asking for help signals inadequacy, and where struggle is failure rather than learning. The world that created early success becomes the invisible constraint that prevents later growth.
Collaboration feels like weakness. Admitting uncertainty feels like losing identity. The child has become trapped by a world they never knew they were building.
Organisations follow the same pattern. In the formative period, instincts crystallise. Mental models take root. The world gets built. But unlike children who continue developing and can, with effort, outgrow early limitations, organisations often freeze. The world that enabled success becomes the architecture that resists transformation.
The Three Organisations
Every organisation is actually three organisations running simultaneously.
There is the Projected organisation: described in strategy documents, values statements, and communication. There is the Real organisation: where people know which rules bend, whose opinion actually counts, and what gets rewarded regardless of policy. And there is the Perceived organisation: how the external world actually experiences you.
When an organisation is young, these three stay close. A child, before socialisation, has not yet learned the distance between feeling and expression; a young organisation has not yet learned the distance between aspiration and operation. The world is still being built, still malleable.
But success changes this. Success favours the Real organisation, the world that actually delivered results. The Projected calcifies around the success story. The perceived drifts as the external world changes while the internal world does not.
The Step Change Test
The trouble surfaces at stepchanges. A stepchange is what happens when the operating paradigm reaches its limit. Continuous improvement stops yielding results. For the organisation to grow, it must shift out of the current paradigm entirely. This is a transformation in the true sense: not change within a world, but change of the world itself.
Indian business is navigating multiple stepchanges at once. Manufacturing is shifting from cost arbitrage to precision. Services shifting from labour arbitrage to knowledge. Family businesses are professionalising. Regional players going national.
And now, AI is arriving across sectors. Not as a tool to be adopted, but as a force that exposes the world you have built. AI does not learn from your strategy documents or values statements. It learns from your actual patterns, your real rules, your operational truth. It surfaces the gap between your Projected and Real organisations with unforgiving clarity.
Consider Indian IT services, an industry built on labour arbitrage, time-zone advantage, and process execution. The Projected organisation now speaks of being a "digital transformation partner" and "co-innovation." The Real organisation still optimises for billable hours, still runs on a pyramid built for volume, still holds actual client knowledge in the heads of a few relationship managers rather than in transferable systems. When AI tools arrived, many firms expected productivity gains. Instead, they discovered what their world had hidden: the expertise was individual, not institutional. The meaningplex that had created three decades of success was now the invisible constraint preventing the next phase of relevance.
Stepchanges expose the world that success made invisible. The gap between the three organisations widens. The Projected promises what the new paradigm demands. The Real delivers what the old world created. The Perceived registers the contradiction.
And here the trap tightens. Stepchanges require examining the world you have built: the foundational assumptions, the mental models, the instincts formed early and reinforced by every success. These feel like facts, not choices. Questioning them feels like questioning reality itself.
The curious child who once asked "what else?" has become an expert who knows the answer. The exploration that built the world has been replaced by the formula that preserves it.
Seeing The Invisible
What does it take to see the world you have built?
Two movements are essential: Thinking Wide and Thinking Deep.
Thinking Wide means making sense of the larger systems the organisation operates within. Not just the value chain, but the industry ecosystem and the sociocultural forces shaping both. Most organisations mistake their immediate world for the whole picture, optimising within a frame without noticing that the frame itself is shifting.
Thinking Deep means surfacing the architecture of the world itself. The foundational instincts, the mental models, the unwritten rules. Not strategies built within this world, but the world that makes those strategies thinkable. The assumptions so deep they feel like facts. The boundaries are so familiar that they feel like physics.
Most transformation efforts fail because they attempt one without the other. Or because they never reach the world at all. They change strategies, structures, and systems while leaving the underlying architecture untouched. The world reasserts itself. The transformation fails.
The New Discipline
The organisations that thrive through stepchanges will not be those that project the most compelling narratives. They will be those who develop a new capability: the capacity to see and reshape the worlds they have built. Call it worldbuilding, not as an act of fantasy, but as a strategic discipline.
This requires a willingness to deconstruct before you can reconstruct. To ask: what world have we built here? Which assumptions are innate to our origins, which were imbibed through experience, and which were induced by intervention? Which elements of this world served the old paradigm, and which does the new paradigm demand we release?
Success and failure both compound, but they compound differently. Failure keeps you exploring, asking what else, what else. Success builds a world and then makes it invisible.
Here is the shift in thinking this moment demands: strategy is not the starting point. Worldbuilding is. Before you can design where to go, you must see where you are. Before you can change the organisation, you must see the world within which that organisation makes sense.
The organisation that sees its own architecture can choose what to preserve, what to release, and what to rebuild. The organisation that cannot will keep solving the wrong problems with increasing precision.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publication. |
