01
Declared organisation
The values, strategy, policies, presentations and public commitments: what the organisation wants people to expect.
Book in development
How Nonsense Becomes Normal
Why organisations say one thing, believe another and do something else
Most of us are taught how to get a job. Very few of us are taught how to read the organisation once we are inside it.
Andrew Porteous has spent more than forty years working in and around organisations, trying to understand how intelligent, well-intentioned people can make perfectly sensible choices that add up to organisational nonsense.
The central lens
Three organisations can exist at the same time
02
Believed organisation
The picture leaders and other insiders sincerely hold in their heads: the explanations, assumptions, measures and stories that tell people what sort of organisation this is.
03
Operating organisation
The organisation revealed by decisions, budgets, rewards, promotions, exceptions, tolerated behaviour, informal power and consequences.
The interesting gap is not simply between what an organisation says and what it does. It is between what reasonable people have come to believe and what the organisation repeatedly teaches them through experience.
Why this book?
Why sensible people keep asking, “Why on earth do we do this?”
Meetings, politics, appraisal, change, bad news, damaging managers, silence and withdrawn care can look like separate workplace irritations. The book connects them to the ordinary organisational machinery that makes some forms of nonsense surprisingly rational and surprisingly durable.
- Why truth gets quieter on the way up.
- Why apparently pointless meetings can be perfectly rational.
- How everyone can do their job and the organisation still gets it wrong.
- How damaging managers are made and protected.
- Why change can create activity without correction.
- Why good people eventually stop caring.
The oddness has a structure.
Part of that structure is organisational self-deception: not deliberate dishonesty, but the ordinary ways identity, selected evidence, filtered information and visible activity can allow a reassuring account to survive.
In brief
- What is How Nonsense Becomes Normal about?
- How Nonsense Becomes Normal is Andrew Porteous’s practitioner-led explanation of why organisations can say one thing, sincerely believe another and repeatedly do something else. It explores the ordinary systems, incentives, beliefs and adaptations that allow the gap between organisational intention and operating reality to survive.
- What is the believed organisation?
- The believed organisation is the picture leaders and other insiders sincerely hold in their heads: the explanations, measures, assumptions and stories that tell them what sort of organisation they work in and what is happening inside it.
- Who is the book for?
- The book is for thoughtful employees, middle managers and senior leaders who can see recurring organisational contradictions and want a clearer way to understand them without defaulting to cynicism or blame.
- What does Monday morning mean?
- Monday morning is shorthand for the operating organisation: the version revealed by what gets rewarded, resourced, protected, excused and allowed to have consequences once ordinary work resumes.
Questions nobody answers
Questions sensible people keep asking at work
- How on earth did they become a manager?
- Why do all these change initiatives fail to deliver meaningful change?
- Why all these pointless meetings?
- Why does nobody tell the CEO the truth?
- Why do good people stop caring?
- What changed after all that activity?
“The website gets Friday. Monday morning supplies some more evidence.”
Five signals Monday morning gives you
- Reward
- What receives recognition, advancement or attention.
- Resource
- What receives time, money and capable people.
- Protection
- Who or what is shielded when pressure rises.
- Exceptions
- Which rules bend, for whom, and with what explanation.
- Consequences
- What actually happens after choices and behaviour.
This is not a score. It is a way of collecting better evidence.
About the author
Forty years of watching organisations from the inside
Andrew Porteous is an organisational and people-development consultant who has spent more than forty years working across organisations, over twenty-five of them as a consultant. His authority in the book comes less from being a guru and more from repeatedly seeing the same patterns from different levels, functions and sectors — and occasionally realising he was part of the nonsense too.
“I am human and write this to my fellow humans.”About Andrew
For teams and organisations
A shared language for conversations organisations already need to have
The book is being developed not only as an individual read but as a way for teams to talk about the gap between what they intend, what they believe and what their operating system actually produces.
Talk to AndrewPossibilities as the book develops
- Team discussion guide
- Leadership-team conversation
- Speaking / organisational session
Book in development
The book is taking shape
Andrew is continuing to refine the manuscript, stories and practical material. This page will develop with the book.