The unwritten rules that decide how work gets done
Think about the last crisis your organisation went through. A major incident. An urgent deadline. A moment when everything was at stake.
What happened?
Hierarchy flattened. Decisions were made in minutes, not weeks. People worked across functions without waiting for a governance forum. Information went straight to the people who needed it. Nobody waited for certainty. Everyone moved.
Then the crisis passed, and it all came back. The slow decisions. The escalations. The waiting for sign-off. Same people the whole time.
What you saw in the crisis was your organisation with its norms suspended. What you live with the rest of the year is the same organisation with its norms back in charge.
Every organisation runs on rules about how execution happens. Some are written down. The approval thresholds. The governance gates. Who signs off on what.
Most are not.
How fast decisions really get made. How bad news travels. Whether the hard thing gets said in the room, or in the corridor afterwards.
The written ones are easy to find and easy to change. The unwritten ones decide whether anything moves. Because execution is not the plan on the page.
It is the everyday decisions people make about what is safe to do here. Change the strategy all you like. Nothing shifts until the unwritten rules do.
If you have been following this series, you will have seen this pattern across every lever. Governance that escalates by default. Ownership that lives on paper. Performance still rewarding what the last strategy needed. Different problems on the surface. The same unwritten rules underneath.
When I was researching strategy execution in large organisations, 96% of the senior leaders I spoke to told me their reliance on rules, process and standardisation had a moderate to extremely high impact on how they execute.
Those rules were meant to reduce uncertainty. But the rule was never the problem. The habit that grew around it was.
One leader described it like this:
"It constipates decision-making. Everything has to go up the chain. Everything is an escalation, no one can make a decision. That means forward momentum is concentrated in the hand of that authority."
Some of that is written down. But escalating the decisions already yours to make is written nowhere. People do it because no one wants to be the one who acted alone.
That is what makes norms so hard to shift.
The written rule you can see, so it gets fixed. The norm you cannot, so it survives the fix. Until someone names it.
The written rules are a design decision. So are the unwritten ones, just made by accident and never revisited. Naming how work actually moves, who really decides, and what people believe they're allowed to do is part of what Operating Model sets out to change.
This is part of lever 7 (Culture for Execution) of the Strategy Execution by Design Model. See the full framework →
Not sure which of the seven levers is holding your execution back? Take the Strategy Execution Maturity Model Assessment →
Written by Rebecca Reti, strategy and execution consultant working with boards and executive teams across Australia and New Zealand.
There's a one-pager on LinkedIn, naming seven execution norms shaping every outcome in your organisation, whether you designed them or not. See it on LinkedIn →