Organisations don’t begin with strategy, although they should (but that’s besides the point I’m making here). They usually begin with momentum (aka legacy systems, inherited contracts, decision-making patterns established over the years – unless they’re a startup, but even then, usually founders come with a baggage of preconceptions). Before any quarterly plan gets drafted, before any transformation (that dreaded word!) initiative launches, the organisation scans its environment. What survives that scan becomes operational reality. The rest gets filed under “future state” and forgotten, unless you have a half-decent foresight team in place, or a continuing relation with one.
This organisational behaviour is basically a compliant memory, a series of accumulated responses to previous demands, ossified into process and policy. The organisation appears to act with intent, but a lot of its behaviour is simply the shortest path through inherited obligations. Expectation tension is what keeps things together.
Expectation Tension as Structure#
Most orgs don’t feel real unless value is being continuously and visibly pulled through them (revenue, utilisation, pipeline, “impact”, shareholder value, supply chain efficiency, innovation outputs, employee productivity, brand equity, etc. ad libitum). Pausing extraction somehow feels like failure, even when it might be the only sane move, but I digress. More to the point, this is why exploring undefined opportunities feels reckless. Why being unexplainable to investors feels dangerous.
From the outside, this looks like good discipline. I can’t seem to shake the opinion that, from the inside, it’s load-bearing anxiety: (i) shareholders expect (semi)predictable compounding returns, (ii) customers expect instant delivery and bespoke service, (iii) governments expect compliance with ever-shifting regulatory regimes and (iv) employees expect stability and meaning at the same time.
Each expectation is locally rational. Together, they create a field of tension that defines what the organisation can and cannot contemplate without triggering alarms. The entity is less a coherent “self” and more a bridge that only exists because there is weight on it. Remove the load, and you discover there is very little structure underneath. (This clearly isn’t how bridges work, but bear with my shoddy metaphor).
This is exactly what I mean by expectation tension: the difference between what the system promises and what its physical, temporal, and political substrate can actually support. In other words, expectation tension is the persistent imbalance between promised outcomes and physical constraints.
In that sense, expectation tension is both (i) holding the current configuration together by making deviation costly, keeping organisations inside the narrow band of what feels explainable and acceptable and (ii) a diagnostic signal where is tension accumulates (i.e., chokepoints, over-optimised suppliers, brittle KPIs, performative innovation labs, etc.), the organisation’s narrative about itself diverges most sharply from its material and political reality.
Staying Readable#
Partnerships and supply chains live inside the same field of expectation tensions, where risk is, essentially, deviation from the (perceived) norm. When an organisation changes without the rest of the system being pre-briefed, the house of cards tends to collapse (do y’all remember that Jaguar brand refresh?). Contracts are written on the assumption of continuity, forecasts on the assumption of smooth cones, infrastructure on the assumption that APIs stay within a standard deviation or two (this time I’m looking at you, Reddit and Twitter).
Inevitably, organisations learn to be legible over everything else. They don’t expand the space of possible moves, preferring instead to stay within what can be reconciled to existing dashboards (don’t get me started on dashboards - a pet peeve of mine) and governance templates. The strategic plan becomes a way of optimising within the implicit, already-agreed cage of expectations.
The traits organisations celebrate (i.e., operational discipline, repeatable delivery, clean stakeholder narratives, steadfast execution under pressure) are often proof of compression. Over time, the organisation is folded to fit within everyone else’s requirements: regulators, customers, investors, T1 suppliers. What remains is (allegedly) an efficient shape that fulfils Jira tickets without creating unnecessary friction or, crucially, surprise. And markets reward this behaviour.
My point here is not to ask what the organisation “really is”, but to show how little of it would remain if you stripped away the external instructions it is built to satisfy. Under expectation tension, strategy often and unfortunately becomes a translation layer, converting extrinsic and contextual demands of “markets” (and I use this term in its most general sense possible) into internal roadmaps with just enough story wrapped around them to infer intentionality. Innovation, then, narrows into the optimisation of existing value chains within known categories and accounting models. Equally, transformation becomes an elaborate reshuffling of siloes and titles that leaves intact the core relationships between promises, constraints, and who absorbs the shock when they inevitably collide.
I hear you cry from the back of the room: BUT! Organisations don’t exist in a vacuum!! If operating without stakeholder-defined metrics feels almost nonsensical, that is not an accident. The sense of impossibility is the outline of what has been excluded from serious discussion: structures, time horizons, and forms of value that cannot be rendered immediately compatible with the current regime of expectations.
Designing Around the Tension#
If expectation tension is structural, it makes no pragmatic sense to ask how you can remove it, rather, it seems more useful to ask how to build around it. If I might be so bold, I can see three ways:
- Expose (or, simply, admit) the fictions – In supply chains, that means naming (and shaming) monopolies and other chokepoints as political decisions, not some sort of inevitable facts of nature. In innovation, it means admitting that portfolios are optimised for narrative coherence instead of actual discovery.
- Build circulation – this goes back to my previous post. New projects, local factories, and pilot programmes only reduce expectation tension if they can borrow, cannibalise, and recombine each other’s capabilities.
- Protect unprofitable slowness – some expectations can only be renegotiated on longer timescales than capital markets naturally allow. Sometimes you have to look beyond and allow ideas to effervesce over a period slightly longer than your next quarterly projections.
The optimistic reading would say: recognise expectation tension, redesign structures, rebalance power, and your organisation can finally become itself. My more honest / slightly jaded reading: you are unlikely to escape expectation tension, but you can at least stop calling it freedom.