Checks & Balances

Strong organizations place checks and balances on the *actions* and *decisions* that people and teams take.

They challange proposed decisions and tap them to make sure they are strong.

There are periodic reviews to check if assumptions have held and to re-calibrate if need be.

They go through multiple rounds of interviews to make sure they bring on the right people with the right experience so they can strengthen the checks and balances on decision making and decisions made.

Weak organizations, on the other hand, check their own people and try to re-balance the odds against them in an attempt to prevent any substantive (i.e. risky when viewed from the lens of a weak org) decisions from being taken.

Project issues are viewed as personal failings rather than the result of structural or material issues and so issues are usually addressed in weak organizations by adding more bodies or replacing high ranking individuals in an attempt to re-balance "capacity."

Proximity and similarity are synonomous with trust in weak organizations so there are more checks placed on decision makers the farther away they are from the corporate core.

Efficiencies and opportunities are lost due to rumor milling and rumor chasing.

Corporate meetings are places to raise doubt and suspicion about other persons and to create invisible checks on said persons.