Practice drift
Our collaboration agreed on a radical new way of working, but in the heat of delivery, we find ourselves slipping back into old, familiar habits.
We started with such clear intentions. We co-created a set of powerful principles for how we wanted to work together—valuing every voice, embracing uncertainty, and sharing power. But as deadlines loom and the pressure mounts, those intentions are starting to feel like a distant memory. Decisions are being made by a small, central group again "for the sake of speed," and the focus has narrowed back to traditional metrics, overlooking the richer, multi-capital contributions we agreed to value. There's a growing gap between the collaborative, equitable culture we aspire to and the more conventional, hierarchical way we're actually operating day-to-day. How do we close this gap and ensure our lived practices stay true to our stated values, especially when things get tough?
Connecting Learnings to this Challenge
This drift between stated values and actual practice is one of the most common challenges in complex collaborations. It highlights the difficulty of embodying new ways of working under pressure.
Areas of the Many-to-Many System that aim to address this challenge
"Practice Drift" is a sign that a collaboration's core principles are not yet fully embedded in its operational DNA. The following areas are designed to help diagnose and address this gap:
- Organising System: This is the primary area for addressing practice drift, as it focuses directly on how 'deep codes' are translated into the day-to-day work of planning, role distribution, and decision-making.
- Governance System: If the formal governance doesn't create clear accountability to the new ways of working, old habits will naturally resurface. This area helps build in the necessary reinforcement.
- Learning System: A robust learning system is crucial for noticing when practice drift is happening and creating the feedback loops needed to consciously course-correct.
- Deep Code Shifts: This drift is fundamentally a failure to live into the desired deep code shifts. Revisiting these provides a clear diagnostic for where the drift is occurring (e.g., are we drifting back to financial-only risk?).
Tools and Examples linked to this Challenge
Moving from a powerful vision to a shared, actionable plan requires more than just good intentions—it requires practical scaffolding. The tools and examples below are designed to help with this critical transition. They offer tangible starting points for co-creating your initial strategy, defining roles, and building the momentum needed to move forward together.
No related tools found.
Alerts
Alerts are the critical 'watch-outs'—the common challenges, tensions, complexities, and areas where we learned special attention is required.
Forgetting that practice trumps design
While a governance approach can design a great container for the work, it is the practice of showing up together that most shapes the collaboration. Insufficient focus on practicing the behaviours, processes, capacities and methods to be in governance together can lead to poor governance cultures, whatever the beauty of the design.
Insufficient capacity, time and resource given to collaborating
It is often significantly underestimated how much time and attention is needed for the organising, governing, learning, operating, practising, embodying and other systems needed in order to do good work collaboratively. When this is not given enough attention the conditions erode over time.
Ignoring group dynamics
Group dynamics are a huge shaping factor in what the group can create together - insufficient attention can create a false economy where the actions we take can’t fulfil their possibility.
Misaligned legal relationships to social agreements
If the agreements that you make in conversation together are then overridden by misaligned legal agreements, the group dynamics can be effected to the point of hindering effective collaboration.
Insights
Insights are the key discoveries that emerged from our work and point to promising pathways and core principles.
Stewardship Assumptions
We need to nurture a system that notices perverse incentives and externalities and accounts for them to create progressively better incentives and more capable deterrents, which in turn can better align different people with the whole.